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NEW ADVENTURES 

MICHAEL MONAHAN 



NEW 
ADVENTURES 



BY 



MICHAEL MONAHAN 

AUTHOR OF "PALMS OF PAPYKU8," 
' NOVA HTBKRNIA," " AT THE BIGN OF THE VAN," ETC. 




NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 









Copyright, 1917, by 
GEOEGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



FEINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEEICA 



OCT 16 1317 



)C!,A476580 



TO 

JOHN QUINN 

A GESTURE OF FRIENDSHIP AND ADMIRATION 



Tons les livres en general et meme les plus admirables 
me paraissent infiniment moins precieux par ee qu'ils con- 
tiennent que par ce qu'y met celui qui les lit. Les 
meilleurs, a mon sens, sont ceux qui donnent le plus a 
penser, et les ctoses les plus diverses. 

Anatole France. 



CONTENTS 

MANNAHATTA 

PAGE 

The Cajaj op the City 15 

A Holiday in Gotham 19 

Trial by Newspaper. 25 

Our ''Brand of Cain" 29 

The Shakespeare Tercentenary: 

An Elizabethan Performance 37 

Sir Herbert Tree's "Shylock" 42 

A Shakespearian Exhibit 51 

MANNAHATTA II 

Spaghetti 57 

Newyorkitis 61 

Old Men eor Love 64 

The Craze for Beauty 69 

Changes in Babylon 74 

The Great White Way 78 

The Morgan Library 83 

In Nubibus 91 

ix 



X CONTENTS 

PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

PAGE 

One Balzac the Lover 99 

Two Balzac the Artist 122 

Three The Fortunate Hoax of Pagan Was- 

TENEYS 145 

Four The Maid Again 160 

Five Our Best-loved Poet 169 

Six Alma Lupa 187 

Seven A Note on Lafcadio Hearn 193 

Eight The Kiss 199 

Nine The "Free" Poets 206 

REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

One Bermuda 219 

Two Bermuda II 231 

Three The Conqueror 247 

Four Two Pictures 257 

Five The Collector 264 

Six The Penman 274 

Seven Chanticleer 280 

Eight The Circus 288 

Nine Nocturne 299 

Ten Yearnings 310 



CONTENTS xi 

FAttB 

jEuEVEN Platonics 322 

Twelve False Youth 328 

Thirteen Ghosts 335 

Fourteen The Age of Safety 342 

Fifteen Best 347 

LAGNIAPPE 

One Philosophy in Little: 

The Literary Motive 355 

Truths and Truisms 361 

The Woman 366 

Two The Grain of Wheat 370 



MANNAHATTA 



MANNAHATTA 

THE CALL OF THE CITY 

I 

I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city, 
Whereupon, lo! upsprang the aboriginal name! 

— Wait Whitimcan. 

HE THAT has once felt the spell of Manna- 
hatta will, if the fates permit, return to her 
again and still again. In other and lesser cities, 
on the waste of ocean, in rural solitudes or desert 
places, the call of the mighty Mother will reach 
him, and perforce he will gird up his loins and 
obey. 

This may be put forth as a more or less poetical 
statement of a fact both simple and psychological. 
He that has drunk will drink, says the French 
proverb; and he that has known Mannahatta 
— literally drunk her, for she is herself a mighty 
intoxication, — will always go back athirst for the 
cordials she alone can supply. 

And so it was that, along about the middle of 
the past May, I began to feel in my blood a sum- 
mons which I have come to know quite well — ^the 

[15] 



MANNAHATTA 

call of Mannahatta. I was not sorry, for the 
Connecticut winter, then barely ended, had been 
the Idngest and coldest in my memory. The mere 
effort to keep physically alive had impoverished 
the spiritual man. Also I had grown weary of 
the Connecticut face, not over-attractive in either 
man or woman in these parts; and there were 
alarming symptoms that I was taking on the 
Connecticut mind. It was May, as I have said, 
and we were still wearing overcoats and sleeping 
under heavy blankets. The newspapers were 
recalling a certain Connecticut year when the 
summer had been lost from the calendar (this 
no doubt a just visitation upon the pleasure- 
hating puritans). My thoughts would not flow; 
my ink-pot derided me; I tasted the cruel despair 
of the man who begins to fail in his natural voca- 
tion. Something had to be done, and quickly too! 
I will arise, I said, and go to my mother Manna- 
hatta, for she alone can heal me. 

Thereupon I fled with a single grip, delighted 
as a man should be who runs away from a hard 
job to snatch a precarious holiday. Nor did I 
pause until I had snugly ensconced myself in the 
very heart of Mannahatta. . . . 
[ 16 1 



THE CALL OF THE CITY 

Balzac somewhere shrewdly observes the persist- 
ence of the vital spark in the sick in the crowded 
quarters of a great city where the strong current 
of human life rises to the full. It is a good 
thought and a cheering one. Life begets life and 
the desire of living; human companionship is 
almost the condition of existence. The hermits 
who have lived long in their solitude are memo- 
rable instances — ^because there have been so few 
hermits. Secular age and health pass without 
comment in the immense human hives where they 
are too familiar to challenge remark. The com- 
mon notion that people live longer in the country 
than in the city, is wrong, like so many other 
received ideas: the truth is, they die earlier and 
faster in the country, and the earlier and the faster 
in direct ratio to the lack of companionship. 
Solitude is the best known aid to the madhouse 
and the cemetery — even the solitude of open fields 
and healthful skies. On the other hand, there are 
in the densely populated ghettos of Vienna, of 
London and of 'New York, surrounded by condi- 
tions that would seem to make health impossible, 
persons so old that time appears to have passed 
them by. 

[17] 



MAl^J^NAHATTA 

Do you want to live and live long? — then be 
where men and women are living, loving and prop- 
agating life. Borrow from the universal vital 
force. Draw on the common fund of health and 
energy. Drink from the full-flowing stream of 
life. Deep calls unto deep and heart unto heart! 
With a million hearts beating around you, with a 
million pulses challenging and inciting your own, 
how can you fail to keep time to the great rhyth- 
mic harmony? From all these you derive strength 
and hope and encouragement ; every throb of every 
one of them all is a summons to live — ^to live — 
to live! 

Now of this hear a proof. It seemed to me, as 
in an evil dream, that I had long been sad and 
dejected, brooding over unhappiness and poison- 
ing my blood with the black viper-doubts that 
strike into the very heart of life; believing my 
heritage of length of days to be forfeited; shun- 
ning the cheerful society of my fellows; keeping 
alone with a swarm of morbid fears and fancies; 
looking on life with the lost gaze of one who 
divines everywhere an unseen but exultant and 
implacable enemy. 

Then, at last, I yielded to the bidding of a 
[18] 



A HOLIDAY IN GOTHAM 

kinder spirit. I threw off the nightmare and 
mingled again with my kind. I went where men 
and women were merry with feast and dance, with 
wine and music and song. I looked for the joy 
of the human face and did not look in vain. I 
recovered in a moment my old birthright of hope 
and happiness. My heart, so long drooping, rose 
at the compelling summons of life about me: the 
old desire to live and love sprung up anew in me 
to hail the red flag in a woman's cheek and the 
bright challenge of her eyes. I filled my glass 
and at the bidding of Beauty and Joy devoted my 
ancient sick fears to perdition. I was merry with 
the rest, aye, merry with the maddest; and since 
that hour ... I live . . . I live ... I live! 

A HOLIDAY IN GOTHAM 

THE PRESENT scribe has known New 
York, " on and off," more or less intimately 
during twenty-five years, but his very first intro- 
duction occurred when he was a little boy of six 
years — a good bit farther back. So he has fully 
experienced the lure of the Great City mentioned 
above, and this the more that in his youth he was 

[19] 



MANNAHATTA 

a shade too curious perhaps ahout lures of every 
species. 

I may then claim, as the phrase goes, to know 
my New York. I have been away from it years 
at a time. I have also lived years within its gates ; 
I have " commuted " to it from Jersey and points 
above the Harlem river. The great changes which 
the City has undergone in the past quarter-century 
are quite familiar to me. I knew it before the 
great Russian-Jewish immigration, when it was 
almost an American city, instead of as now, in 
many sections, a predominantly foreign one. I 
knew Fifth Avenue before it was invaded by 
trade, when its proud pavements were unpressed 
by the present hordes of Yiddish-speaking toilers 
— those wonderful people, creators of new wealth 
and new problems, who will have much to say in 
the future destiny of New York. I witnessed the 
rise of the sky-scrapers, from the " World's " 
gilded dome to the loftier turret of the Woolworth 
Building, which give New York a certain 
grandiose distinction among the great cities of 
the world. I saw the first shovelful taken for 
the first Subway, and I waited for the opening 
of the Hudson Tunnel, which seems to have been 
[ 20 ] 



A HOLIDAY IN GOTHAM 

but the other day, while — such is the tremendous 
march of the city's life — it is already spoken of 
as a thing of ancient date. I saw the City fling 
out long arms in order to bring to herself the 
cities and towns that make her boroughs of Brook- 
lyn and Queen's and the Bronx. Nay, in the 
span of years mentioned I have seen her become 
the first City in the world! 

But hear now a truth. If one's lot is cast among 
so many and so great marvels; if he is, moreover, 
obliged to hug his own personal problems in the 
midst of them, then is he apt to lose the due sense 
of wonder. That was something my own case 
when I dwelt within the gates of Gotham. Hence 
my keen desire to see her as a visitor in holiday 
mood. 

And I was not disappointed. There is an elec- 
tric, exhilarating something in the air, — an invi- 
tation to be happy, as it were, — which no other 
American city offers, and which Paris alone pos- 
sesses in greater degree — that is, in perfection. 
There is illusion about this, of course, for New 
York behind her gay, smiling welcome is cruel, 
more cruel than Paris, and also not less calculating 
as regards the prices she exacts from the seekers of 

[21] 



MANNAHATTA 

pleasure. But this is not a thought with which to 
plague your holiday with our Lady of Manhattan. 
Yes, you can be as happy as you please in New 
York, dear reader, especially if you have the 
wherewithal that pays the dues of happiness; 
money indeed is very necessary, and New York 
looks askance at him who has it not. But even 
this is but a partial truth, for as Richard of the 
Quest has wisely said, our Paradises are often 
cheap — it is our Hells that cost us so dear. New 
York spreads a feast for the eye and ear of him 
who hath but little money in his scrip, and I felt 
this as never before when on the afternoon of my 
arrival (to make the most of my scant liberty) 
I rolled up Fifth Avenue, gallantly perched on the 
hurricane deck of a Green Bus. This is one of 
the cheapest and best pleasures that the City has 
to offer; he need not lack it who may command 
the tenth part of a Broad Piece. You deposit 
your dime in a box which the guard or conductor 
presents to you; he is not allowed to put in the 
fare himself. Such a precaution, you think, might 
humiliate an honest man, and the farther you go 
the more you are convinced that common honesty 
is not much regarded, nor taken for granted, in 
[22] 



A HOLIDAY IN GOTHAM 

New York. Tipping is for once out of the 
question, and the decent visitor may voyage 
heart-free along the richest thoroughfare in the 
world. 

The day was one of splendid sunshine, and the 
avenue presented the most brilliant and animated 
spectacle that one could wish for, the roadway 
being fairly a-swarm with the automobiles of the 
rich, while the sidewalks were thronged with prom- 
enaders, especially women in bright spring toilets 
(we are now in the favoured region above Forty- 
second street) . Majestic at the crossways stand the 
giants of the New York police, giving rule and 
order to the confluent and opposing tides of the 
avenue. No trivial duty theirs; one has but to 
think of what consequences would attend a single 
minute of anarchy in the government of these two 
great processions. No class of men have been 
more savagely and wantonly abused than the New 
York police, and it well may be that there is a 
dark side to the shield. But I am not the less sure 
that they have never had due credit for their ster- 
ling virtues and the uncommon heroism which they 
so often exhibit in serving law and order and hu- 
man life. In all my experience of New York, I 

[23] 



MANNAHATTA 

have never seen a policeman misconduct himself, 
and I have never been rudely treated by one. This 
will seem astonishing to people who get their im- 
pressions of the New York police from a certain 
kind of lurid fiction, or from newspapers with a 
political axe to grind. In point of fact, nothing is 
ever so bad in New York as the newspapers make 
it out to be, which newspapers derive a profit from 
defaming the city to the country-at-large. Most 
of the crazy notions relative to New York, which 
are especially cherished by strangers and foreign- 
ers, are due to a lot of hack writers, scribblers of 
patent inside stuff for country weeklies, who lack 
ability to present a correct picture even of a New 
York policeman. Certainly no great city has ever 
suffered so much from libellers within its own 
gates. 

So thinking, I leaned over the rail of our green 
chariot and gratefully saluted a crossing guardian. 
Again luck was with me, for he courteously 
returned the salute (something almost unheard 
of in the newspaper legend). Then we turned 
west and fared gaily on toward Riverside Drive 
and the castled heights of those envied apartment 
folk who pay rentals of from ten to twenty-five 
[24] 



TRIAL BY NEWSPAPER 

thousand a year. A domain of imposing fronts, 
gorgeous courts and porter-guarded inaccessible- 
ness; in fact, Apartmentaria seems to offer every- 
thing that wealth could desire. And surely wealth 
in New York was never more conscious of itself 
than it is to-day. Happily there was no " barker " 
on our coach to blare out, in an East Side accent, 
the wigwams of the many-dollared ; I will here 
observe a like reticence. 

TRIAL BY NEWSPAPER 



AS EVERYBODY knows, New York is— the 
Woman! It is the most feminized of all 
our cities; the one in which American woman- 
worship is carried to the wildest extreme; the one 
in which scarcely anj^thing is done without refer- 
ence to the Eternal Feminine. Almost comic is 
the universal preoccupation with sex, as reflected 
in the newspapers, the magazines, the theatres, the 
cafe life, everywhere. And (though I am the 
first to announce it) the true symbol of New York 
is the Powder Puff. This in spite of the fact 
that she has so far refused the ballot to women. 
But there is a difference to note: New York 

[25] 



MANNAHATTA 

loves women for their beauty and the pleasure 
they can give, not for their intellectual qualities. 
The first typical New York woman you see on 
Fifth Avenue tells the story : — her dress, her man- 
ner, her allurCj the very atmosphere she creates 
about herself, all declare the human orchid of 
intense sex-cultivation. The 'New York woman 
is notoriously the most sex-conscious in America, 
and she cares nothing for the ballot. She wants 
to rule men in the way of the ancient sovereignty 
of her sex, and she is anathema to the man-hating 
suffragette. 

When you see a perfect specimen of this type, 
you will readily admit that she is worth all the 
trouble she occasionally makes and all the money 
that men lavish upon her. She is the woman whom 
one is tempted to personify as New York. 

This woman, proud, beautiful, sex-conscious, 
miraculously expensive, is the spoiled darling of 
Gotham, but, of course, there is not a majority 
of her kind. Even in Manhattan one sees many 
a woman who could not be anybody's darling, and 
such women, it is unkindly said, are the chief hope 
of the suffrage cause. 

New York is so thoroughly feminized in the way 
[26] 



TRIAL BY NEWSPAPER 

I have suggested, that it is next to impossible 
to convict a woman of a capital crime. The 
singular process known as Trial by Newspaper, 
here carried to a point of perfection, can 
almost always be relied upon to get the woman 
off. 

While I was in the City a woman was acquitted 
of the charge of murdering her two infant chil- 
dren, the fruit of an illicit passion. The fact that 
she gave them poison which caused their death 
was not disputed. On her behalf, there was medi- 
cal testimony of the usual wabbling, inconclusive 
sort, to prove that she was deranged when the 
crime was committed. In further mitigation, it 
was pleaded that she took the poison herself in a 
sufficient quantity to kill; but in spite of obvious 
juggling and collusion on the part of certain wit- 
nesses, this was not established. Nevertheless, the 
woman went free, amid a great trumpeting of the 
newspapers and with every sign of the public 
approval. Nay, even the District Attorney who 
had prosecuted her, though fully convinced of her 
guilt, hastened to offer his congratulations. Fem- 
inism had secured the acquittal of this woman, who 
in England or in Canada would have been sum- 

[27] 



1 MANISTAHATTA 

marily convicted and, if not hanged, sent to prison 
for life. 

The singular issue of this case vindicates the 
importance of Trial by Newspaper. During many 
months before this woman was brought to the bar, 
her case was constantly agitated, featured and 
discussed in the newspapers. It was precisely 
the kind of stuff they love to handle, with love, 
seduction, crime, and all manner of sexual sugges- 
tiveness, as the chief ingredients, and an erring 
woman as the heroine. All the emotional female 
journalists — the Sob Squad as they are called — 
were put to work on the story. Their fictive 
tears drooled incessantly through the evening and 
morning editions; the vast army of people who 
read only the newspapers, and read these until 
they can see only yellow, were thoroughly satu- 
rated. What jury picked from such a public could 
do otherwise than this jury did? The District 
Attorney never had a chance, and as he felt lonely 
and neglected during the pubhc congratulations 
on his failure to convict, I don't blame him for his 
words of sympathy. A verdict is a verdict, and 
even District Attorneys cannot afford to be in- 
different to Trial by Newspaper. 
[28] 



OUR "BRAND OF CAIN" 

Singularly enough, about the time this woman 
was acquitted of murdering her children and was 
sent forth to freedom with gracious and honouring 
words from the press, another woman, widely 
known for her ability and courage, was sent to 
prison for the crime of advocating birth-control. 
Such is thy consistency, O Manhattan! 

OUR " BRAND OF CAIN " 

CRIMINAL LAW, as exhibited in the New 
York courts, seems mostly a noisy, foolish, 
futile farce, with wrangling, jawing lawyers who 
have taken their wit from the vaudeville, their 
manners from the Tenderloin, and whose learning 
or courtesy is never ostentatiously in evidence. 
These strenuous persons play " rough-house " 
with each other and, as far as they dare, with 
the court, for the amusement of the spectators 
and the profit of the newspapers, which report 
the salient vulgarities of their wordy warfare. 

The object of the able counsel on each side is 
by any and all hazards to keep out of evidence the 
least hint of truth that would injure their case. 

Every one, not a fool, present in the court, is 

[29] 



MANNAHATTA 

fully aware that the Truth is near and cries out 
for a hearing. But the lawyers nearly always 
muzzle it in time, or if it break away from them 
and run shrieking to the learned judge, he is sure 
to apply the garrotte. No doubt this is all strictly 
according to the rules of procedure, but to a plain 
mind, unversed in the tortuous ways of the law, 
the whole thing looks like an organized conspiracy 
to keep the facts out of court and make a mock 
of justice. ' 

Naturally, Justice fares ill in her encounter with 
these active, resourceful lawyers who have no use 
for her presence — she is punched, mauled, cross- 
countered, upper-cut, dragged by the hair and 
subjected to all manner of abuse, while the learned 
judge gropes among his authorities. 

It is not wonderful that Justice should be 
defeated in such a place and under such condi- 
tions — the wonder is that she ever gets a show 
for her life, as she does now and then, when 
nobody is looking on or particularly inter- 
ested. . . . 

In England it seldom takes longer than a week 
to try a murderer. In New York it takes all the 
way from one to three years, according to the 
[30] 



OUR " BRAND OF CAIN " 

means of the accused and the abihty of the law- 
yers. Murderers without friends or money are 
shuffled off with less ceremony, but even in such 
cases there is often delay unknown to the English 
courts. 

Murder trials in England are conducted with 
stern impressiveness. There is no sensationalism, 
in the American style. The accused, whatever his 
or her station, is treated with the impartial rigour 
meted out to all under the hand of the law. He 
or she can not have other meals than the prison 
fare. He or she is not allowed to receive flowers 
either from friends or the morbidly inclined. The 
hundred and one circumstances which in this coun- 
try serve to heroize the shedder of blood and for 
the time being to solicit the fearful admiration of 
a large section of the public, are totally wanting 
in the conduct of an English trial. Most impor- 
tant of all, the newspapers do not " spread " upon 
it, elaborating every morbid detail, working the 
prurient or sexual interest to the farthest limit, 
making a cult of homicide to serve their own sen- 
sational ends. That is the method of our Yellow 
Press which, as has been alleged of the New 
York police at their worst, creates more crime than 

[31] 



MANI^AHATTA 

it detects or reports. By comparison, the English 
newspapers are deadly dull in their treatment of 
murder trials — no " scare headings " six inches 
deep in lurid type, no pictures, snap-shots from 
every possible angle; no stories in the advanced 
journalistic style, one part fact to three parts fake; 
no dramatization of dirt — nothing of all that inde- 
cent exhibit which debauches the public of New 
York and helps to make a travesty of justice. 

Is this generally the reason that human life is 
far safer from crimes of violence in London than 
in New York? — that fewer murders are com- 
mitted in all England during a year than in the 
city of Chicago in the same space of time? — 
waiving entirely the blood-drenched statistics of 
the Southwest, with the auto-da-fes of the 
lynching belt? 

Not long ago the English press were printing 
homilies on the " brand of Cain in the great 
Republic." Can we deny the brand? and how 
comes the smirch, if not by the corruption and 
degradation of the law? 

I am not an upholder of capital punishment. 
I believe that the state should not take human 
life; that neither the state nor the individual has 
[32] 



OUR " BRAND OF CAIN " 

the right to slay. But the first duty of the state 
is to preserve its members. England does this 
better than our own country, and she has far less 
blood on her hands. If she were to abolish the 
death penalty to-morrow, her hands would be 
cleansed of blood, and life under her laws would be 
as fully secured as now, since these laws would 
be carried out to the letter. 

The fact that in this free country no law carries 
a guaranty of enforcement, withholds many people 
from demanding the abolition of the death penalty. 
As things are and as they will long be, it would 
be a harder job to shut up a murderer for life 
than to send him to the gallows or the electric 
chair. One of our own judges has said that " the 
American people do not greatly object to the shed- 
ding of blood — except by process of law!" 

England goes on grimly killing her murderers, 
but she does kill them, and that keeps the crop 
within bounds. In this country we coddle and 
foster them by every possible means — chiefly by 
defeating or corrupting the law. Hence the crop 
is so large that in some centres of American cul- 
ture, murderers crowd honest men into the gutter 
— and no apology asked or given! 

[33] 



MANNAHATTA 

Perhaps when we get tired of making over- 
much money and planting our kind of civilization 
in the benighted Orient, we may give a little seri- 
ous attention to this matter. 

Meantime, Liberty — God bless her! — would be 
fairer without that red smirch on her throat, and 
Justice would appear more seemly on her august 
tribunal but for her trick of stooping to the 
vaudeville lawyers and sometimes even courting 
the evil favour of the Yellow Press. 

WHEN DICKENS first visited this country, 
something over sixty years ago, the feud 
spirit was at its height in the South, the Granger- 
fords and the Shepherdsons were busily potting or 
carving one another all over that section, and the 
duello was being invoked for the settlement of 
even minor points of honour. Of all this blood- 
letting the great novelist recorded his impressions 
in the " American Notes," subsequently published, 
which raised a howl of rage against him from the 
press of this country, especially in the centres of 
" chivalry." 

A score of years later Dickens came over again 
and made a highly profitable lecture tour of the 
[34] 



OUR " BRAND OF CAIN " 

States. Whether it was owing to the warmth of 
his reception or that he found an abatement of 
our pleasant homicidal ways, it is certain that he 
made a handsome and almost candid apology for 
" Chuzzlewit " and the " Notes." The latter, it 
may be remarked, is still the better reading of 
the two. 

A generation has passed since Dickens's last 
visit and, though we have mended our manners 
considerably in the South and elsewhere, it must 
be admitted that, as somebody in " Huckleberry 
Finn " says, there is still a " right smart chance 
of funerals " among us. The feuds have all de- 
clined, largely owing to the interested parties 
being mostly killed off; but as a compensation, 
there are far more lynchings than in Dickens's 
day. Also the " unwritten law " tragedy is much 
more common both South and North. Indeed, 
with the approval of a large section of the press, 
this is now become the National Specialty, 

Dickens had some very cutting things to say 
about the New York press of ante-Civil War days, 
but what would his satirical genius have done with 
the recently evolved and perfected Trial by News- 
paper? What would he have thought of a great 

[35] 



MAISTNAHATTA 

public melted to maudlin compassion by the arts 
of a prostitute, aided and abetted by a shameless 
press? A journalist of the highest mark himself, 
how would he have regarded the degradation of 
journalism by a set of professional male and 
female panders, expert sensationalists, artists in 
pruriency, corrupters of youth and age? How 
would he have treated the brazen assurance of the 
quacks calling themselves alienists, who for enor- 
mous fees are ready to give any sort of testi- 
mony needed in order to bring off a murderer? 
What sort of rebuke would he have addressed to 
the harpy lawyers defending and fleecing their 
client — ^to the stupid or complaisant judges suf- 
fering the farce to drag endlessly on — to the shame 
and horror and disgrace of it all? 

Do you doubt that were Dickens living to-day 
he would write something on all this, which would 
instantly make waste-paper of " Chuzzlewit " and 
the "Notes"? 



[36] 



SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY, 

THE SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY 

An Elizabethan Performance 

DURING MY visit to town the Shakespeare 
Tercentenary was in full swing, but it 
seemed to me that the celebration was a painfully 
worked-up affair, lacking heart and spontaneous 
feeling. Writers who knew nothing about Shake- 
speare — according to Frank Harris, an excellent 
authority — were rushing into print with more or 
less valuable contributions. Actors, not specially 
identified with the Shakespearian drama, were giv- 
ing interviews in which they protested their pas- 
sionate attachment to the Bard and their regret 
for the indifference of the public who have turned 
their back on the classic tradition. Modest per- 
sons, incapable of self-advertisement, were declar- 
ing that Shakespeare was their only reading, and 
ladies of " Society " were graciously appearing in 
masques and tableaux designed to honour the im- 
mortal Man of Avon. There was almost the same 
apparent furore of enthusiasm which (according 
to " Mr. Dooley ") once moved the New York 

[37] 



MANNAHATTA 

public to wish to put a fur coat on the Goddess 
of Liberty in the bay and call her Kipling. Had 
it been proposed to metamorphose the Statue into 
a likeness to the Chandos or Droeshout portrait, 
the public would, I am sure, have been absolutely 
dehghted. But even at that it wouldn't have 
proved much for New York's love and under- 
standing of Shakespeare. 

I went to the Century Theatre to see the 
" Tempest," for which production was chiefly 
responsible Mr. John Corbin (who insisted upon 
spelling the Bard's name as Shahspere). It was 
notable for an attempt to reproduce the stage and 
dramatic accessories of Shakespeare's time, and the 
full text of the play was used without, so far as I 
could judge, any material omission or expurgation. 
The experiment was interesting and even praise- 
worthy, but I doubt if it would " go " under less 
favouring circumstances or without a special audi- 
ence. In spite of the painstaking character of the 
production and the average excellence of the cast, 
there were leaden interludes which even the fre- 
quent flashes of golden poetry did not serve to 
relieve. Prospero, wonderful as he is in the 
library, was at times dreadfully prolix and boring, 
[38] 



SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY 

while no small part of his magic business seemed 
laughably puerile. This may have been the fault 
of the actor, who certainly failed to realize the 
mystical role of Prospero, and whose manner of 
reading the lines stripped them of all poetry; but 
I doubt if any mime, however gifted, could have 
made the part entirely acceptable. Time's rasure 
has told strongly against the " Tempest " as an 
acting play, though it will always be read with 
pleasure for the poetry which only Shakespeare 
could have written. The " rightful Duke of 
Milan " cannot, I think, be otherwise than wrong- 
fully put on the boards, and with a complaisance 
from the auditors which may rarely be counted 
upon. Then it is never to be forgotten that the 
language of Shakespeare is not our language — 
more's the pity ; and so it does not " carry " in 
the theatre, where quick apprehension is the chief 
desideratum. It was palpable at this performance 
that a great many of the lines were lost upon the 
audience. Even Prosperous wonderful speech 
beginning — 

Our revels now are ended, these our actors, 
As I foretold you, were all spirits, — 

[39] 



MANNAHATTA 

passed, as the actors say, " without a hand," 
Also the strained look on many faces betokened 
imperfect understanding; and I felt that 
the Cohan drama was nowise threatened in its 
popularity. 

Again, it was demonstrated that the present- 
day public cannot abide Shakespeare (same man 
as Mr. Corbin's friend Shakspere) without expur- 
gation. Honest William's manner of calling a 
spade a spade, without euphemism, will not go 
down with us. It is not that we are more moral, 
perhaps, than the Elizabethans; but, of a truth, we 
are more fastidious, and we shudder at words with 
the muck of nature attached to them. In this play 
the bawdy oaths of the seamen and the coarse 
fooleries of StepJiano and Trinculo were very 
palpably a severe trial to the audience, and even 
the splendid work of Walter Hampden fell short 
of making Caliban a fit person to introduce to the 
Young Girl. Rather did this crude piece of 
nature, half faun, half beast, keep the audience 
in a constant moral trepidation. Indeed, when 
the unlovely son of Sycoracc voiced his regret at 
having failed to ravish Miranda, and deplored his 
lost hope of peopling the isle with Calibans, there 
[40] 



SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY 

was a tensity of mute protest among the audience 
which it was quite impossible to mistake. 

And mind you, the audience as a whole was such 
an one as could not readily be assembled for a 
Shakespearian play; cultured, appreciative and 
disposed to condone the Bard's occasional gross- 
ness for the sake of his magical poetry. 

And yet, when all is said, I am not sure but 
that Ariel (exquisitely realized by Fania Marinoff ) 
carried away all faults of the production. Cer- 
tainly she at times persuaded us of the true 
wizardry of Prospero^ especially when that long- 
tongued old person was absent from the scene. 
Delicate Ariel! thou wert the very thought of 
Shakespeare, his most darling creation, his familiar 
spirit. As we listened to thy prattling lyric speech, 
so strangely mingled of earth and faeryland, our 
souls were veritably touched by the spell of that 
wondrous genius who " was not for a day but for 
all time"! 

So you see, I end on a note of praise. And, 
indeed, I am very glad that I saw this really, 
truly Elizabethan representation of " The Tem- 
pest " by William Shakespeare (or Shakspere), 
for which I make my best compliments to Mr. 

[41] 



MANNAHATTA 

John Corbin, the talented producer. The chance 
was one, I am convinced, that will not soon occur 
again. 

Going back to my hotel after the play, Caliban's 
speech to Trinculo — " Thou art a god and bearest 
celestial liquor " — kept ringing in my head. And 
I reflected how the Bard always gives his deepest 
word to the fool in his plays ; not, we may be sure, 
without a profound or even divine significance. 
For Shakespeare himself was a god and bore a 
liquor celestial; that he sometimes tipsified himself 
with it, hke StephanOj is true enough and only 
goes to prove that even the gods have their 
penalties. 

Sir Herbert Tree's " Shylock " 

THIS IS the Jew 
That Shakespeare drew," 

rhymed Pope after seeing Quin in the character 
of Shylock. What a famous character it is, en- 
twined with what memories of histrionic renown; 
the glory of the English stage, from Betterton to 
Kean! And what a play, exhibiting the great 
[42] 



SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY 

Poet's mastery of passion, with a weaving through- 
out of golden fancy! Is't not in itself an estate 
rich as a kingly reversion, and would not we, like 
the lady Olivia, rather lose half our dowry than see 
mischance come to it? . . . 

This is all very well, but certain Americanized 
Hebrews have no sort of use for the Jew that 
Shakespeare drew, declaring the same to be a libel 
on their kind. Much of the poetry thereof is as 
hateful to them as was the screaming of the wry- 
necked fife to Shylock himself, though so pleasing 
to young Jessica. They will not stand for the Jew 
of Venice, and they have made protest against the 
study of the play in the public schools of Wash- 
ington. 

That there is a strong touch of exaggeration in 
Shylock need not be disputed. Shakespeare wrote 
at a time when mediaeval notions about the Jews 
still prevailed universally. Shyloch's demand for 
the literal satisfaction of his bond — the flesh from 
over Antonio's heart — is doubtless in strict keeping 
with the popular sixteenth or seventeenth century 
conception of the Jew. People in the England 
of Shakespeare's time had no more love for the 
Chosen Race, and as little regard for their feel- 

[43] 



MANNAHATTA 

ings, as present-day Russians who still accuse them 
of ritual murder and other abominations. 

It is regrettable, of course, that Shakespeare 
had such narrow views and brutal prejudices, but 
it need not be pointed out to our Jewish friends 
that literature was greatly the gainer thereby. A 
milder conception of Shyloch would have given us 
a weaker play, the strength of the piece depending 
upon the exaggerated ferocity of the Jew. But 
what images this over-imagined truculence and 
malignity of Shyloch lent to his creator! What 
tragic truth in this personification of a hated and 
proscribed race that yet was feared as well as 
hated, and knew how on occasion to collect its 
revenge! Shyloch seems as great as Holy Writ 
(which is also charged with certain defects and 
exaggerations). The creation of this character 
remains one of the lofty monuments of human 
genius. Those misguided persons who condemn 
it or insult at it put themselves in a hopelessly 
absurd position, like that of an ant, say, defecating 
against one of the pyramids! 

For great literature is above all racial grudges 
and susceptibilities, and anything savouring of an 
attack upon it, in the interest of a clan or a 
[44] 



SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY 

prejudice, challenges resentment on every hand. 
I remember that Heine, himself a Jew, was a 
great admirer of this play and made a wonderful 
study of it. He very evidently did not regard 
Shylock as a libel on his ancient race, conceived 
in mere sordid Jew-hatred, but rather esteemed 
him as one of the great achievements of Shake- 
speare. I recommend those Washington Hebrew- 
Americans to read Heine's remarks on Shylock 
in his book entitled " The Women of Shake- 
speare." It may induce them to withdraw from 
their present position, which is apt to bring odium 
upon the Jewish people. 

By the way, why don't these ultra-sensitive Jews 
protest Fagin in Dickens's "Oliver Twist"? It 
seems to me they might do so with much stronger 
reason. Yet we have just seen, under Jewish man- 
agement, too, a great revival of the play made 
from Dickens's story, in which the terrible Fagin 
was the chief character. Compared to Dickens's 
red Jew steeped in all manner of crime, Shake- 
peare's Shylock is fit company for the Rothschilds 
and the Zionists. 

It is not generally known that Dickens sketched 
his Riah, the benevolent Jew in " Our Mutual 

[45] 



MANNAHATTA 

Friend," as a sort of reparation and amende for 
Fagin. The character is one of his weakest, and 
may serve as a warning against the literary 
apology. ... 

Having seen Mr. Corbin's Shdkspere, I decided 
I would plunge on the Tercentenary and take in 
Sir Herbert Tree's Shakespeare. This worshipful 
Knight of the drama was formerly known as 
Herbert Beerbohm Tree, but in the process of 
ennoblement he dropped the middle name, or per- 
haps sunk it in the Atlantic on his voyage to us. 
The matter is not important anyway, though I 
have no doubt that Sir Herbert's title had much 
to do with filling his houses. There be many ISTew 
Yorkers who would rather see a real live British 
Knight than Shakespeare himself in the flesh, were 
the alternative possible. This was acutely under- 
stood and fully taken advantage of by the man- 
agement. 

I saw this titled and eminent actor in only one 
play, the " Merchant of Venice," and it may not 
be fair to judge him from a single performance. 
I can at least begin by complimenting him: — he 
is a master of stage-craft, an excellent producer. 
[46] - 



SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY 

Thank goodness, he did not attempt to show us 
the " Merchant " as it was presented in Shake- 
speare's time, but gave it with all the scenic and 
mechanical accessories of the modern stage. I was 
very glad thereat, for to be quite frank, I can 
see that a steady course of imitation Globe Theatre 
might pall on the most enthusiastic Shakespearian. 

So we had a superb, realistic setting for this 
famous play, which I think helped out not a little, 
even with Shakespeare as the author. There was 
the very Rialto itself (what scene more cele- 
brated?) where Shylock was wont to be rated for 
his usances by Antonio, and where he whispered to 
Tubal his dream of revenge. There were the flash- 
ing waterways of Venice, with real gondolas glid- 
ing through them, bearing happy lovers along the 
moonlight-silvered paths. Here was the Ghetto, 
and there Shylock' s " sober house," just as they 
must have been in that reality which Shakespeare 
transferred to immortal romance. And for a 
proof, see Jessica, the daughter of Leah, looking 
from her window upon the carnival fooleries, 
despite her father's injunction; the while she is 
intent for the signal of young Lorenzo. 

Yes, I know it must all have happened as 

[47] 



MANNAHATTA 

Shakespeare tells it : — Jessica at her window, plot- 
ting to betray her father, convinces me; and her 
treachery, though it seem to be but lightly 
touched, is the deepest note in the play. 

And here I will hazard an observation that may 
challenge protest. I believe that even good Chris- 
tians have scant sympathy with the false daughter 
of Shyloch, whose light-hearted treason is so 
strongly contrasted with her father's iron character 
and inflexible purpose. Shakespeare has endowed 
the Jew with so much genius that, in spite of preju- 
dice that is of our very blood, he wins a large 
measure of our sympathy. We almost wish that 
Jessica were not of his house (one cannot imagine 
a Jew looking at her without a clutching of the 
throat). Belmont bridals are very well, but this 
Jew has suffered much and he interests us more 
than a parcel of fortune-hunters and bad debtors. 
Nay, we are not so sure that this honest Antonio 
(who will take a man's money yet spit upon him!) 
is either hero or martyr, with his bosom theatri- 
cally bared to give Shylock his pound of flesh. 
The crushing award of Portia (a poor enough 
quibble, by the way), the taunts of the Venetians 
baiting the Jew in his wild grief and rage — a 
[48] 



SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY 

veritable piece of the ancient Israel — leave us 
strangely cold. We are all-absorbed in that tragic 
figure, and we recognize that Shylock is the true 
hero of the scene. 

Did Shakespeare intend it to be so? Not if we 
must accept the traditional interpretation of his 
play, which faithfully reflects the crude prejudices 
of his time. I think Shakespeare, with his won- 
drous illusive genius, made this play of seeming 
purpose to please the mob, while he entrusted the 
secret of his real feelings to Shylock who, though 
defeated, still remains the one great figure in the 
piece. This is, at any rate, the paradox of the 
" Merchant of Venice," and I think the Jews are 
very foolish who protest this play, which is actually 
a superb compliment to the Chosen People. But 
I don't blame any of them for wanting to wring 
the neck of that slippery little Jessica. 

Mr. Tree's acting was strong and intelligent, 
but it seemed to me to have few moments of real 
greatness. His Shylock was less commanding in 
his rage and ruthless purpose than pathetic in 
his weakness and defeat. No doubt, this falling 
off was mainly due to a voice whose lack of reso- 
nance and colour terribly handicaps this actor for 

[49] 



MANNAHATTA 

the great roles of Shakespeare. But, like the late 
Henry Irving, he indemnifies us with his skill as 
a producer and his mastery of stage-craft. His 
visit should have a good effect on theatrical con- 
ditions in this country, but I doubt if it will do 
much to revive the Shakespearian drama. The 
raw truth is that listening to the same seems too 
much like work to the " tired business man," and, 
as I have hinted above, the language is often 
obscure or positively unintelligible to a great 
majority of the public. Besides, each generation 
loves to see itself mirrored on the stage, and the 
classic never has a chance with the contemporary, 
whatever the disparity of merit. So it need not 
hurt us overmuch to admit that New York prefers 
" Potash and Perlmutter " or the Ziegfeld " Fol- 
lies " to the best acted play of Shakespeare. After 
all, I am not sure that the public is greatly at 
fault. It will do no good to insist upon the tyr- 
anny of the classics. In time Shakespeare must 
pass from the stage where he has lorded it so lon^: 
can we pretend that he is not already all but gone 
in this country? Do you suppose that we shall 
still be presenting his plays when the fourth Cen- 
tenary comes round? Do you fancy that, with 
[50] 



SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY 

the constant change and corruption of language, 
New York will understand him any better in the 
year Two thousand and sixteen? Nay, I conclude 
in the words of a modest but estimable author : * 
" Though it be certainly true that Shakespeare 
was not for a day but for all time, yet is change 
written upon all things, and the stage will one day 
be closed to the mightiest of its monarchs. Never, 
we may be sure, the Book in which he rules the 
hearts and the imaginations of men." 

A Shakespearian Exhibit 

ALSO I gave myself the pleasure of looking 
over the Exhibition of Shakespeariana at 
the New York Public Library which, by the way, 
is the finest classic structure in the City : — a splen- 
did testimony to the truth that the world has not 
been able to advance a step beyond "the beauty 
that was Greece." 

Here were shown early prints of Shakespeare's 
plays and poems, the famous First Folio (valued 
at thousands of dollars) spurious works attributed 
to him, books that he had read and used as 

* See "At the Sign of the Van," page 2T2. 

[51] 



MANNAHATTA 

" sources," books containing allusions to him, etc., 
etc. Of the last mentioned, none interested me so 
much as Greene's " Groatsworth of Wit," pub- 
lished in 1592, a stupid thing which has been im- 
mortalized by its attack upon Shakespeare. He 
was only twenty-eight when the envious Greene 
likened him to *' an upstart Crow beautified with 
om* feathers ... in his own conceit the only 
Shake-scene in the countrie." This was maybe the 
very book, the identical page which exposed the 
taunt to Shakespeare's eye, and no doubt caused 
that eye to flash and the poet's cheek to pale. 
Glory and Envy are here strangely met again 

after the lapse of three centuries. 

I was most interested in the books printed dur- 
ing Shakespeare's lifetime, texts of his Plays and 
Poems which he himself saw and handled. How 
carelessly they were thrown upon the world, those 
offspring of his mighty genius! His Poems were 
thought more of than his Plays, it is said, and 
his concern for the former proves that he himself 
shared this preference. Among those who missed 
the greatness of William Shakespeare was the man 
himself! This was, no doubt, because of his pre- 
ternatural facility. He seems to have produced 
[521 



SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY 

his wonderful works without agony or exhaustion; 
and his fellow-players testify that they received 
his papers without a blot in them. 

It is hard enough to believe, for Shakespeare's 
supreme greatness is in his passion, and the chil- 
dren of passion should bear the marks of their 
paternity. However this may be, I will remark 
that the total effect of this exhibit was to raise 
an overwhelming sense of the identity of the Man 
and the Poet. I was never a Baconian, in faith, 
sweet William having possessed me from my 
fifteenth year; but the perverse folly of those 
who would rob the great Poet of his due, in the 
presence of these testimonies, struck me as a thing 
outrageous beyond parallel. As I say, I myself 
never doubted Shakespeare, for I learned him 
young when the heart has more wisdom than the 
head. Yes, I came under that mighty spell in 
boyhood, and I have always regarded it as the best 
part of my education and the most fruitful adven- 
ture of my mental life. 

The portraits of the Poet shown in this collec- 
tion call for a special word. One would like to 
believe that the so-called Griffin Portrait of Shake- 
speare is an authentic likeness. Although but re- 

[53] 



MANNAHATTA 

cently discovered, or at least made public, it is said 
to have been for two hundred years in the posses- 
sion of the Griffin family in Northamptonshire. It 
is further alleged that the Bard's paternal great- 
grandmother was a Griffin. I do not know 
whether the experts will allow this claim, and I 
must say the legend strikes me as more romantic 
than probable. The point, as I have said, is one 
for the antiquarians to decide. But I would be 
glad to accept this Portrait as the true present- 
ment of Shakespeare. It seems to be an idealized 
composite of the Chandos and Droeshout pictures, 
painted by an artist of genius. It is beautiful, 
fresh, living — alas, too much so to compel the 
fullest faith. There is a certain quite indescrib- 
able royal dignity in the eyes — one feels that 
Shakespeare must have looked so. Those eyes 
seemed to follow me with their proud yet gracious 
smile; and when at length I withdrew from the 
room I did not turn my back upon them. 

Does not one so retire from the presence of a 
King? 



[54] 



MANNAHATTA II 



MANNAHATTA II 

SPAGHETTI 

Dis earns ipsis, quippe ter et quater 
Anno revisens aequor Atlanticum 
Impune; me pascunt olivae. 
Me cichorea levesque malvae. 

— Horace, Lib. 1-31. 



Dear to the very gods themselves 

{Since never vainly do I troth 'em) 
And three or four times o' the year 

Levanting down to Gotham; 
Me the tart olive nourisheth. 

With other such confetti. 
And one thing Flaccus quite forgot, 

Italia s pride — spaghetti! 

1 CONFESS to a great partiality for it. 
The place where you get it right, at least 
to my taste, is a modest Italian table d'hote in 
Twenty-seventh Street, just off Broadway. Here 
it is served as the piece de resistance of a dinner 

[57] 



MANNAHATTA II 

that costs you one dollar, plus a two-bit piece. 
Bigger and more showy places there be a-plenty, 
where you pay a fancier price and the vermicular 
cereal is dished up with more frills and fussiness; 
but the essential spaghetti, — ^the thing in itself^ to 
speak philosophically, — will not be so good. The 
difference is one of savouriness and relish ; a cook's 
secret which holds many faithful to the little 
bodega in Twenty-seventh Street. 

Here, too, the soup (which seems to contain all 
the Horatian vegetables, and a few beside for good 
measure) is of an extraordinary virtue; while as 
for drink, you may command a sound Brolio or 
Antinori. (I do not mention Italian sweet wines, 
for I never could abide them.) Either of the 
wines named, moderately dry and not overheating, 
makes an excellent table beverage or vin ordinaire. 
My own practice, which has classical warrant, is 
to dilute the wine about one-half, and taken this 
way I have never known any bad effects to result 
from it. The Italians, by the way, are brought 
up in the daily use of their native wines, and as 
every one knows, they are an exceptionally temper- 
ate people. In this country, however, they drink 
more beer than wine. But though we may not 
[58] 



SPAGHETTI 

agree as to all this, the reader must grant me that 
without wine there is no Italian dinner. One 
might as well think to leave out the spaghetti! 

In a word, you can dine excellently for a couple 
of dollars, and if you are content with heer or 
native vintages, the damage will be less. The 
point is worth noting in view of the exaggerated 
stuff put forth by newspaper writers who are bet- 
ter acquainted with Childs's than with Sherry's or 
Delmonico's. There is, of course, no end of dining 
places where the prices are made especially for 
snobs and free spenders, places that flatter the 
fool's purse as well as his vanity; but such are not 
our present concern. 

During my fat years in and about Gotham (oh 
yes, I had a few, reader) I sometimes stole a peep 
into the Book of the great Brillat-Savarin and 
learned a little of the hedonistic science of eating. 
'Tis a sin I readily pardon myself since it had 
the salutary effect of confirming my devotion to 
the simple life, to which I always returned with the 
heartier relish after a whirl with the Gadarenes. 
y^ell, I have often fared more sumptuously but 
never more wholesomely and en joy ably than at 
the little caupona mentioned above, where I like 

[59] 



MANNAHATTA II 

to think the soup has a distinct Horatian flavour, 
and the wine, one can easily make believe, is of 
the true Falernian brand. Anyhow, if these be 
vanities and illusions, they are not at least charged 
to you in the bill; they cost nothing extra, and 
they add unspeakably to the pleasures of associa- 
tion. I am not sure that the great Brillat-Savarin 
has mentioned it, but in the business of dining well 
the mind and the imagination must first be ap- 
pealed to, and in truth the stomach plays only a 
subsidiary part: — ^when it gets control it eats the 
man! 

Nowadays, whatever occasion may call me to 
"New York, I am pretty apt to reckon upon treat- 
ing myself to a real Italian dinner, with the gen- 
uine spaghetti made in Italy. Oh, of course, I 
insist upon that! . 

Now, what do you think? I had scribbled thus 
far, and my mouth was deliciously watering at the 
prospect of spaghetti, when a disquieting rumour 
reached me. It seems that, owing to the War — 
every annoyance nowadays is charged to the 
War — ^this famous Italian spaghetti, like the 
beer of Munich, is no longer procurable in this 
country, and what we get, and have had for some 
[60] 



NEWYORKITIS 

time past, actually comes from Russia. Can this 
be true? The idea of Russian spaghetti is not 
inspiring, to say the least, but I swear I could not 
detect any difference in fibre or flavour, on my 
last visit to Town. Another illusion? But I am 
not shaken for all that: — I still cry, Viva spa- 
ghetti! 

NEWYORKITIS 

SOME YEARS ago a man of physic by the 
name of Girdner made a frenzied bid for fame 
by publishing the diagnosis of a disease which he 
called Newyorhitis. The thing had been observed 
before that and some of the symptoms described, 
but Girdner was rightfully awarded caveat, as he 
was the first to identify it as a distinct malady and 
give it a name. 

Like other great benefactors of humanity, 
Girdner had small reward for his pains, and 
after a three days' wonder he was forgotten. Not 
long ago, I am told, he succumbed to Newyorhitis, 
thus by a strange fatality falling prey to the 
dread disease of which he had been the virtual 
discoverer. 

[61] 



MANNAHATTA II 

Meanwhile, the terrible plague (for it is nothing 
less) continues to extend its ravages and to add 
to the appalling total of its victims. No other 
result could indeed be looked for, seeing the lack 
of intelligent therapeutics and the constantly 
increasing population of the Great City. 

Girdner is perhaps in his grave where, it may 
be hoped, that after life's fitful Newyorkitis he 
sleeps well. His book sleeps even more soundly, 
and the warnings which he voiced a short decade 
ago are unheeded and forgotten. I hate to rush 
into the breach, dear friends, but somebody will 
have to lead the forlorn hope. So here goes! 

What, then, is NewyorMtis? It is, as its name 
certifies, a special kind of disease to which New 
Yorkers are liable. Many are its manifestations, 
and a deranged sense of the relative importance 
of things is one of the most familiar symptoms. 
The afflicted person never suspects that anything 
is wrong with him and often remarks, apropos of 
nothing, that " little old New York has the rest 
of the Cosmos beaten to a frazzle," whatever that 
may mean. 

Girdner erred, I believe, in ascribing Newyork- 
itis largely to the varied and infernally torturing 
[62] 



NEWYORKITIS 

noises of the city. These have their effect, no 
doubt, and the nerve-grinding horror of the sub- 
ways, in particular, writes itself in certain forms 
of the malady. But if Girdner were living to-day 
he would have to admit that more potent and 
malefic agents are to be traced to the Yellow 
Press, the mad chase of the dollar, and above all, 
the universal sex-lunacy. Different in kind as 
are these engendering causes, they lead ultimately 
to the same thing, and that is Newyorkitis. 

The Yellow Journalist makes broad his phy- 
lacteries and writes but one word upon them — 
Sex! His fellow, the theatre manager, has noth- 
ing else on his playbills but Sex! And while 
there are many reasons for hunting the dollar in 
New York, the dominant one is Sex! 

Therefore, I think Dr. Girdner might have 
made a stronger point as to the share which the 
epidemic sex-obsession has in bringing on New- 
yorkitis. As I remember, the learned man does 
not mention this at all, a thing that seems to me 
inexplicable. For to a lay mind the devouring 
preoccupation with sex, to which the newspapers 
cater so grossly and untiringly, would seem to 
be responsible for the worst phases of the disease, 

[63] 



MANNAHATTA II 

such as paresis, erotomania, hireinitis, marital dis- 
satisfaction, divorce, drunkenness, etc. All these 
and many kindred things are the fruit of our 
unashamed devotion to the great goddess Lubricity 
as certainly as the fig tree beareth in her kind. 



OLD MEN FOR LOVE 

¥ N NEW YORK it is the custom of Everyman 
-^ and his Best Girl or his Wife or {s'il vous 
plait) some one that may be nor wife nor maid, to 
dine several times a week at some favoured restau- 
rant or hotel. This gregarious feeding is a strong 
point with the typical Gothamite, and it may go 
far to explain that virtual abandonment of the 
" home idea " which is a marked feature of life in 
the Metropolis. Anyhow, it solicits us as a distinct 
symptom of Newyorkitis to make a note right here 
on a certain phase of the morals and manners of 
the Big Town; which we proceed to do with our 
customary circumspection. 

Kipling has observed in a well-known poem 
that — 

Old men love while young men die. 
[64] 



OLD MEN FOR LOVE 

And he explains the reason why in an ingen- 
ious fable. Whether the poet fabled truly 
or not, — ^whether it is because young men 
die, it is very certain that old men love. 
And one is tempted to say that they seem to 
have the preference in woman-worshipping 
Gotham. 

So at least you might infer from even a casual 
review of the night life of the Town. At all the 
swell cafes where the sexes meet for the pleasant 
business of guzzling and gorging, the call is 
obviously for oldish or elderly men and young 
women. An unsophisticated looker-on would sup- 
pose any but the true relationship between all these 
grey and blonde or brunette heads so snugly tete- 
a-tete imder the twinkling lusters, with that before 
them which stimulates appetite and enjoyment in 
persons of all ages. The seasoned New Yorker 
looks on it as a matter of course, and seldom 
ascribes a paternal or avuncular or even a marital 
relation to the grey-haired gallant. Not if he 
knows his New York. 

Papas are not so flatteringly attentive, uncles 
not so affectionately devoted, husbands not so 
lover-like and languishing. Oh, no! and persons 

[65] 



MANNAHATTA II 

of ill-assorted ages in legal or family bonds do 
not have such a good time together. 

Then, you say, these old men and young women 

are all ? Pshaw, let's not bother what they 

are, except that they are — ^having a good time! 
This is little old New York where people mind 
their own business or had better. Voilal 

Certainly these highly fed, well-groomed old- 
sters seem to know the game, and if you watch 
them a while you will wonder less at the strange 
preference of their fair companions. Do not old 
men beat young men at most games of patience 
and stratagem and cunning? And is not love pre- 
eminently such a game? Tut, tut! these fair 
young things know quite well what they are 
about. They are not so uncalculating as they 
look, not by a good half. In truth there is a 
shrewd purpose behind their own play. The old 
lover is gentle and kind and indulgent; above all, 
generous. There may be a trifle too much gold 
in his teeth and too little hair on his head. That 
falsetto crack in his laugh, too, jars on one, like 
certain effects of light on his profile or the turkey- 
gobbler movement in his stringy neck. But he has 
the prestige and the experience of a hundred con- 
[66] 



OLD MEN FOR LOVE 

quests; and he never hurries you with the rough 
impetuosity of youth ; and he's really splendid com- 
pany, though his talk is a little boresome; and 
though an old fool, of course, he's not nearly so 
exacting as a young fool would be — and, in short, 
he is IT. (Newyorkese for comme il faut.) 

You remark that the young women seem proud 
of their elderly cavaliers and carry themselves 
with a more pronounced air of assurance than as 
if they were companioned by younger men. Yes, 
they seem palpably more sure of themselves — of 
their charm and their power. Is this perhaps the 
true underlying motive of their preference for 
lovers or " friends " who might be their fathers — 
even grandfathers are not out of the reckoning. 
Woman's vanity may well be at the bottom of 
this as of other anomalies. Age is (of course) 
a potent inspirer of confidence. 

So much for the psychology of those who go 
down to fish and be fished for in cafes, where the 
Belly-God and other divinities of the flesh are 
frankly worshipped. But their affair is not a 
complex matter — the problem really sounds pro- 
founder depths of human nature than are to be 
studied in this gay world of light and sensuality 

[67] 



MAISTNAHATTA II 

and pleasure. It is one that radically marks the 
difference between the sexes. Since the morning 
of time young women have freely given themselves 
to old men; young men have rarely given them- 
selves to old women. We revolt at the fact, as 
we revolt at that other fact, equally shocking and 
indisputable, that niodesty is much less native to 
women than we pretend to believe by a useful 
social convention. Still both facts remain to set 
us hunting occasionally for reasons that shall 
satisfy inquiring or unsophisticated youth. 

Fogazzaro, the Italian novelist, in his book, 
" The Saint," seeks to make out that certain old 
men exert a mystical attraction upon young 
women, and there are surely instances a-plenty in 
both sacred and profane history to support his 
theory. However, the mystical attraction with 
which the world is generally familiar in such cases 
usually takes the form of what is vulgarly called 
the " mazuma." Lacking that, the old man has 
the hardest kind of a game to play, and the in- 
stances in which he wins out are too few to be 
counted. But he commonly has the money, by 
virtue of his age and wisdom; and ever since that 
gay old trifler Jupiter appeared to a pleasing 
[68] 



THE CRAZE FOR BEAUTY 

young woman in a shower of gold, this form of 
temptation has proven irresistible to the sex. So 
long, then, as beauty deigns to dollars this appar- 
ent perversion of nature will continue and the 
poet's mournful refrain hold true — 

" Old men love while young men die! "^ 

THE CRAZE FOR BEAUTY 

NEW YORK is gone daft on the subject of 
female beauty. Many and strange are the 
tokens of its madness. The present carmagnole 
or craze for the tango, etc., may be noted as one 
of the most virulent symptoms. Venus victrix 
smiles at the ineffectual opposition of the preachers 
and moralists. It was always thus, she says to 
herself a little wearily. 

Beauty is the engrossing theme of the popular 
newspapers, whole pages being given up to it and 
experts employed to develop its every erotic 
phase. 

Priestesses of the modern Aphrodite boldly 

* In order to complete this picture of New York's night life the 
foregoing brief chapter is borrowed from the Author's " At the 
Sign of the Van." 

[69] 



MANNAHATTA II 

unveil the art and mystery of female attraction. 
The flagging hopes of the plain woman are revived 
from day to day by fresh hints and expedients. 
Female vanity is kept worked up to a pitch of 
exacerbation, which plays hob with the economies 
of the male kind. All of which is very profitable 
to the newspapers, the vendors of cosmetics and 
the department stores. 

Women are told that their chief end and duty 
in life is to make themselves beautiful. A cele- 
brated opera singer and divorcee advises them that 
in order to preserve the shape they should (if 
married) bear only one child and that at forty! 

Actresses are induced by flattering cheques to 
divulge their alleged " beauty secrets," and their 
articles — at least those written for them-^are got- 
ten up with remarkable abandon. It is clearly no 
care of milady's if they cause pangs of desire in 
any manly breast. If she was inclined to opulence 
of flesh, we are told in text and picture how she 
kept her curves within the beauty zone. If of a 
tendency to meagreness, how she plumps herself 
out to what is technically termed a " broiler." 

We are permitted to see milady in the various 
phases of the toilet, and in none is she chary of 
[70] 



THE CRAZE FOR BEAUTY 

exposure. An odour of rice-powder seems to rise 
from the elaborate detail and depiction of her 
charms. 

Society ladies figure very prominently in this 
vulgar exhibition for the corruption of the masses. 
Beauty is not, alas! a strong point with the smart 
dames of the Four Hundred, but the fact does not 
seem to qualify their passion for displaying them- 
selves en decoUetee. It is evident that they make 
it very easy for the journalist to get their portrait. 
The journalist rather more than reciprocates the 
courtesy, for he is always pleased to make room 
for milady's pet Pomeranian in the picture. 
Woman and dog, no doubt, contribute vastly to 
the simple pleasures of the multitude. 

Every visiting foreigner is asked to give his 
impressions of the American woman, her beauty, 
style, etc. If his remarks fall short of the usual 
exaggeration, the newspaper " edits " them into 
acceptableness. If uncomplimentary — that is, 
strictly veracious — ^they are usually suppressed. 

But perhaps a plain man may be allowed to 
ask, without offence, where is all the beauty that 
the newspapers talk about? 

Nothing is so common as the newspaper phrase, 

[71] 



MANNAHATTA II 

a beautiful woman : few things are more rare than 
the actual sight of one. Perhaps in a normal life- 
time one does not see a score of women really 
deserving to be so called. Art is nothing like so 
fortunate; the classic past afforded but one Venus 
de Medici! 

Where, oh where is all the beauty? . . . 

I strolled for hours on Fifth Avenue and saw 
little or nothing of this overflowing and superabun- 
dant plenty of female pulchritude. It is true I 
saw many women whose style of dress, or partial 
undress, advertised the fact that they deemed 
themselves beautiful; but that is a different 
matter. 

The old adage that a modest woman is known 
by her dress, must be terribly out of date, for 
modesty was the one thing not suggested by the 
styles of costume referred to. What they did 
suggest and literally throw in your face, was the 
allurement of sex. That at least is indisputable 
(I suppose) whatever one may think of the 
alleged beauty so fulsomely harped upon in the 
journals. 

It is natural and proper that women should 
dress in a way to move the admiration of men, 
[72] 



THE CRAZE FOR BEAUTY 

but not so as merely to emphasize the difference 
of sex. This leads to mistakes which might prove 
very embarrassing. 

Heine tells of being in conversation with Balzac 
on the street in Paris one day when a lady of the 
most distinguished appearance passed by. 

" She is a duchess at least," remarked the poet. 

*' Not at all," said the great romancer; " she is 
une femme entretenue" (a kept woman!) . . . 

There were very few ladies on Fifth Avenue 
that afternoon who would have reminded any one 
of a duchess. 

But there were many who made you think of 
chorus girls, odalisques, Cyprians, files de joie, 
by their allure and manner of dressing. Unques- 
tionably, they were for the most part virtuous 
women complying with the indecent fashions of 
the hour. 

But is it not curious how the eternal Phryne 
always sets the modes for her virtuous sisters? 
Ah! what would they not risk to win something 
of her fabled charm and beauty? 

The hazard at least is distressingly evident. . . . 



[73] 



MANNAHATTA II 



CHANGES IN BABYLON 



HARK YE now to the tale of a laudator 
temporis acti. Back in the 'Nineties, Four- 
teenth Street ranked with the " high spots "of the 
Town and was celebrated from Hoboken to the 
Golden Gate. When I knew it in that not-so- 
remote epoch, it seemed by night a roaring, corus- 
cating artery of life and pleasure, especially young 
life that balked at no risks and no ginger, how- 
ever hot i' the mouth, and pleasure that scorned 
to take thought of the morrow. Tammany Hall 
was there, and there also were the crude liberties 
deemed symbolical of the Tiger. From Second 
Avenue to Seventh you had what the fine writers 
call a microcosm of typical New York life. Visit- 
ing youth, eager for their novitiate of pleasure, 
plunged at once into Fourteenth Street, which 
as eagerly licked them up and called for more. 
Here was the Rialto, here were theatres and many 
weird species of amusements, freak shows, concert 
saloons and of a truth, drinking places galore. 
Tony Pastor (with whom the proper glory of 
vaudeville departed) had here his own theatre 
[74] 



CHANGES IN BABYLON 

and reigned without a rival, while the Fourteenth 
Street Theatre flourished at the high tide of suc- 
cess. Here was Theiss's (famous or infamous, 
n import e, 'tis but a memory) profiting by the 
exuberance of young life — Theiss's which many 
a pensive oldster will recall for the baptism it 
gave him. And perhaps there was not a single 
Babylonish rite lacking in the rubric of pleasiu'e 
nightly rehearsed in those few crowded blocks of 
Fourteenth Street. 

To-day all is for the most part changed. Four- 
teenth Street is deconstellated and, so to speak, 
taken from the map. It is practically dark at 
night and quiet as the Street of Deacons in a 
Vermont village; the tides of life and pleasure 
have swept beyond it, leaving it stranded and 
deserted. It still does a little show business in 
the daytime, mainly with the Moving Pictures, 
but an old frequenter of the 'Nineties would 
scarcely recognize it for the glory it was in the 
halcyon period here recalled. A little more time 
and the gloom of the encroaching warehouse dis- 
trict will effectually extinguish it. He that would 
seek the image of what Fourteenth Street was in 
the years of its glory must hie him northward to 

[75] 



MANNAHATTA II 

the Great White Way. Even so, much that was 
characteristic is perished and gone forever. Man- 
nahatta devours her children; brief are their 
generation. 

To an old-timer the eclipse of successive areas 
of the Town, as business drives pleasure before it, 
must be a melancholy sight: — is it not like seeing 
a tomb built over your best and happiest years? 
But such is the price we pay for the vaimted 
progress of the City: where there is fabulous 
wealth in the counters of Commerce some of us 
can only see the abomination of desolation. Trade 
puts forth her leaden mace and presto! all is 
changed as by magic. Huge loft buildings cover 
the site of cheerful theatres, darkness comes down 
where once the twinkling cressets made the night 
as bright as day. 

And lo! even while we are mourning the deso- 
lation of Fourteenth Street, the same bitter portion 
has befallen Twenty -third in the onward march of 
Trade. Another bright artery of the City's life 
shut off and darkened. Gone are the theatres 
and the tripping feet of pleasure; gone the lady 
with the enigmatic smile advertising the Oldest 
Profession (she is more apt to be of the race of 
[76] 



CHANGES IN BABYLOlSr 

Rahab than she was twenty years ago). What 
havoc in our memories, in the ordered sequence 
of things! Here stood yesterday the Hoffman 
House, most celebrated of New York hotels, 
clustered thick with legends of statesmen, politi- 
cians, leaders of every sort, beauties and dandies. 
Where is it to-day? Swallowed with the Albe- 
marle (memorable to me for that I first met there 
the famous " Mr. Dooley," then in his fulgent 
meridian) ; a monster of stone and iron towers 
above the familiar site, with not a wrinkle to show 
where they went down! The transformation is 
repeated on every hand. Places as famous and 
familiar as not long ago was Martin's at Twenty- 
sixth Street and Broadway, have vanished as 
though they had never been. Vainly shall you 
seek the Haymarket on Sixth Avenue (for socio- 
logical or other reasons) — 'twas effaced by a 
spasm of reform. Even the Tenderloin — a whole 
district! — has gathered up its skirts and flown to 
the Fifties. 

It seems our cue to follow: — the modest reader 
may rely upon the discretion of this personally 
conducted tour. 

[ 77 ] 



MANNAHATTA II 



THE GREAT WHITE WAY 



THE ROMANCERS of the daily press have 
dubbed the stretch of Broadway from 
Thirty-fourth to the Fifties the Great White Way, 
in allusion to the quantity of electric illumination 
in that section. Here or hereabouts are the princi- 
pal theatres and many of the leading hotels, swell 
cafes, night resorts, etc., and here the pulse of 
temptation is supposed to beat a feverish tattoo. 
It is a gaudy, garish region, but an unbeautiful, 
spite of the romancing journalist; the electric 
signs, with all their prodigal waste of light, are 
hideous to the eye, and they insult the soul with 
base advertisements. They leap the dome of 
heaven in letters of fire to proclaim the virtues 
of a Chewing Gum or a Breakfast Food, of a 
St. Louis Beer or a Purgative Pill. They fla- 
grantly typify and exploit a phase of the material 
mediocrity of New York — ^the catchpenny spirit 
which cheapens and degrades whatever it touches. 
There are grand hotels — the grandest and surely 
the most expensive in America, in this region, but 
as a whole it is about as crazy and heterogeneous 
[78] 



THE GREAT WHITE WAY 

as one could imagine. It betrays a people in 
whom there is no defined artistic sense; who may- 
achieve something beautiful by accident or some- 
thing monstrous by design. The lack of any rul- 
ing principle of beauty — even of mere order and 
regularity, of anything resembling a plan, — the 
jumbled, higgledy-piggledy character of the build- 
ings and their environments, especially above 
Forty-second Street, — are a howling disgrace to a 
city of metropolitan pretensions. If I were asked 
to name a part of New York that should exhibit 
in microcosm most of her defects and, above all, 
the barbarism that cries out amid her marvellous 
display of wealth, I would name the Great White 
Way. 

But if this region be grotesque by comparison 
with the splendid symmetry, the ordered magnifi- 
cence of Paris or Vienna, it is not the less humanly 
interesting in its own fashion; and I cheerfully 
devote to it a few pages. 

Here is the most celebrated habitat of the free 
spender in America and the pare aucc cerfs of 
those who pursue delicately the lure of the flesh. 
In other words, this is a hothouse wherein strange 
fruits of pleasure are nursed to a perilous ma- 

[79] 



MANNAHATTA II 

turity, concerning which stranger tales are told 
by men who do not seem the happier for the 
telling; such tales as may not even be hinted at 
in these discreet pages. In short, this is what the 
newspapers call the " amusement section " (ele- 
gant phrase!) of the Metropolis, and the amuse- 
ments are varied to suit tastes the most perverse 
and exacting. That is as much as it is good for 
you to know, pudent reader! 

Here is a large population that lives by pleas- 
ure, its means and procurements, and especially 
dedicate to what Kipling calls *' love o' women." 
A hectic folk, cocottes, souteneurs^ gamblers, men- 
about-town, rakes, wastrels, all mixed up in a 
himiorous promiscuity. The grace of God is lack- 
ing among them, but there is, by compensation, 
a terrible zest of life. Here the " actor's face " 
seems native, and the dialect of the theatre salutes 
you on every hand; vaudevillians abound and the 
sharp-faced emissaries of the Sons of Sem. Here 
the young Ass pursues his peccadillo, often pluck- 
ing therewith its penalty, and the Old Sinner fishes 
with a troubled eye. If the whole truth of what 
happens in this amusing district between midnight 
and five o'clock of any morning could be told — 
[80] 



THE GREAT WHITE WAY 

well, I will only say that it would be very much 
more interesting than the romances of the Yellow 
Press. 

And it was here I saw a sight that has remained 
before my mind's eye above all the spectacles that 
New York had to show me. I speak of the white 
feet on Broadway in the vivid centre of the Great 
White Way. Feet of young girls in white shoes, 
with shortened skirts. Twinkling feet, gliding 
feet. Here and there restlessly treading amid the 
crowds. Going and returning. Stopping now and 
then for a moment. Sometimes moving very 
swiftly and again strolling with leisurely 
pace. Twinkling white feet of young girls 
on Broadway. This was the most wonderful 
thing I saw during the night hours in New 
York. 

These girls were quite young — some of them 
seemed mere children — and they were made up 
to accentuate their youth — ^that most coveted 
flower of the Great White Way. Most of them 
were beautiful, yet one was troubled at the first 
glance whether their beauty was of innocent, untar- 
nished youth. Where were they going, those 
white feet on Broadway, and what errand called 

[81] 



MANNAHATTA II 

them abroad that night? Were they hunting or 
hunted, pursuing or pursued? God knows. 

But this I noticed, that very seldom were two 
of these girls together; they went their devious 
way single and unpaired; they might meet and 
greet each other, as they often did, but each would 
turn and go her way alone. 

Little white feet on Broadway, threading the 
crowd so surely and fearlessly, walking amid 
snares and traps which the imagination dare not 
picture. Young faces passing suddenly that leave 
a strange pang at one's heart. Why this sorrow 
you cast upon us? Why this fear you leave with 
us in passing? Why this impulse to follow and 
save you from something we dare not name? 
White feet like gulls in the great human sea. 
Flying hither and thither. Now and again lost 
in the confluent crowds, but always emerging. 
Going and returning. Moving restlessly or stop- 
ping but for a moment. Ever apparently aim- 
less and ever dreadfully intent on something we 
dare not name. As the hours passed you fluttered 
away finally — whither? Even as the gulls, it was 
impossible to track your flight; but one by one 
you went and did not return. 
[82] 



THE MORGAN LIBRARY 

White feet on Broadway, do you trample any 
mother's heart — do you walk the ways of shame 
and death? Little white feet of young girls on 
Broadway, what were you seeking that night? 
. . . God knows! 



THE MORGAN LIBRARY 

IT IS generally allowed that the late J. Pierpont 
Morgan was a man of marked genius in sev- 
eral capacities; a giant among financiers, a busi- 
ness builder and organizer without an equal, a 
capitalist who combined imagination with the 
greatest practical sagacity. His wealth and power 
were the envy of all men and no doubt prevented 
the public from forming a just estimate of his 
character. Unquestionably, he dominated the pub- 
lic mind beyond any other private citizen of the 
Republic; there were times when, as during the 
money panic several years ago, he quite dwarfed 
even the President of the United States (who hap- 
pened to be the egocentric Roosevelt) . 

Even in Europe Mr. Morgan excited nearly as 
much interest and was almost as grossly flattered 
by press and public. He was Mr. Morgan of 

[83] 



MANNAHATTA II 

London quite as much as he was Mr. Morgan of 
New York. His financial projects were received 
with great favour and respect by the most con- 
servative, and the highest nobles sought him as if 
to avail themselves of that Midas-touch which 
turned all things into gold. Mr. Morgan was not 
too proudly democratic to do business with them, 
and meantime he looked after an interest that was 
even dearer to his heart. Needless to recount here 
his wonderful campaigns as a collector by which 
he enriched the Metropolitan Museum with the 
costliest, most coveted art treasures of European 
galleries. This was his amusement rather than his 
work, but the genius of the man appeared no less 
in his coups as a collector than in his financial 
and industrial operations. He attracted to him- 
self something of the greatness of the Medici; like 
a prince he gave and like a prince he acquired in 
the domain of Art. 

I am not attempting here a eulogy of Mr. 
Morgan, and I believe that we know little enough 
about the real man: — ^the Morgan of the news- 
papers was largely a mythical person created by 
the dollar- worshipping journalist, for great as his 
wealth was, we know that it was exaggerated in 
[84] 



THE MORGAN LIBRARY 

the newspaper estimates. But I grant his splen- 
did gifts to the cause of Art in this country, and 
I have a great admiration for the genius which 
acquired and the munificence which bestowed 
them. The question as to how his immense for- 
tune was come by, or whether millionaires are as 
a class desirable, has nothing to do with my present 
subject. 

Mr. Morgan, then, was a collector in the Grand 
Style, and nothing that he did or left behind him 
so strikingly attests his greatness in this aspect 
as his own Library in East Thirty-sixth Street. 
Here, in the very heart of the costliest section of 
"New York, he raised a beautiful building — a clas- 
sic marble structure — for the housing of such 
literary treasures and rarities as he prized too 
intimately to entrust to any public institution. He 
who had given so much to the public would yet 
keep something for himself; yet even in this pos- 
session he was not jealously exclusive, for he threw 
open the Library at times to scholars, authors, 
students and others capable of valuing the priv- 
ilege — a policy which is continued with equal lib- 
erality by his son, the present J. P. Morgan. The 
building, its ground site and its treasures are esti- 

[85] 



MANNAHATTA II 

mated at several millions of dollars; as a privately- 
owned library, it is without an equal in the world. 
As I have said, it is undoubtedly Mr. Morgan's 
finest achievement in the Grand Style — ^the one 
that most signally compliments his genius. 

The privilege of visiting the Library and in- 
specting some of its treasures — (it would require 
many visits to examine the collection in detail) — 
was accorded to me, and this I account the most 
fortunate incident of my brief sojourn in New 
York. 

Mr. Morgan's chief pride was in his Library, 
and here he passed his happiest hours, according 
to Miss Belle Da Costa Greene, the charming and 
very capable Librarian. While showing me the 
things I most desired to see, she recalled personal 
traits of Mr. Morgan which did not agree at all 
with the image of the truculent financier projected 
by the newspapers. Always at Christmas time 
he made her read to him the " Christmas Carol " 
from Dickens's original manuscript. It is written, 
by the way, in a very small, crowded script, and 
I reckon that Miss Greene fully earned her large 
salary while she was so employed. 

The original MSS. of famous English classics 
[86] 



THE MORGAN LIBRARY 

are the most interesting feature of the Morgan 
Library. I allowed to myself that money was of 
some use, after all, when I was permitted to hold 
in my hands (not merely to look at them in a 
glass case) the very pages on which were first 
written poems that have possessed my heart from 
early youth. As I turn these precious leaves, still 
vital with inspiration though tarnished by time, I 
think there has been no great literature made since 
the typewriter — that arch-leveller and aid to medi- 
ocrity — ^has come into use. Here, for example, 
is the MS. of Tom Moore's " Lalla Rookh," traced 
in the minute, delicate hand of the Irish poet. 
How it recalls to me my first peep into that won- 
drous arabesque of poetry and music! I close my 
eyes and see the printed page before me as clearly 
as I did, an enchanted boy. And there are the 
sonorous opening lines of the " Veiled Prophet," 
as I have never forgotten them: — ^verily, old 
Mokanna, I would give somewhat to recover the 
years since our first meeting. Eagerly I look to 
see if they are the very same — 

In that delightful province of the sun. 
The first of Persian lands he shines upon, 

[87] 



MANNAHATTA II 

Where all the loveliest children of his beam. 
Flowerets and fruits.^ blush over every stream^ 
And fairest of all streams, the Murga roves 
Among Merou's bright palaces and groves. 



Yes, the lines are indeed the same, and the flow- 
ing music, and perhaps the magic is still there for 
young hearts and eyes ; but a chilling wind of time 
seems to blow from the page upon the present 
reader. Alas! life once dazzled even as this poem, 
and life, too, has faded. I put down Mokanna with 
a sigh, yet smiling at his awful wickedness which 
once filled my young dreams with terror. (I have 
since met unveiled Mokannas who were far more 
formidable.) Dear, kind, tuneful Tommy Moore, 
how could he think to create a terrible villain when 
all his witchery was love, moonlight and music? 
I turn a few more pages, and lo! I forgive him 
his Mokanna for " The Banks of the Calm Ben- 
demeer " — an Irish melody, very slightly oriental- 
ized. Maybe it is not poetry at all, as some of 
the later finicky critics protest; but it caught me 
young, Messieurs, and your clever arguments do 
not touch the heart. Even now my faithful mem- 
ory revives no small part of the old charm and — 
[88] 



THE MORGAN LIBRARY 

I think, is the nightingale singing there yet? 
Are the roses still bright by the calm Bendeemer? 



I take up the original manuscript of the First 
Canto of "Don Juan" by the wicked Lord 
Byron, who was the adoration of my youth and 
whom (unhke so many wiser critics of my time) 
I have never abandoned. Do I love him so much 
because I can always find my youth in his pages? 
Perhaps ; first loves in literature are apt to endure. 
And criticism is only relished by persons of middle 
age who have lost the flair for poetry and romance. 
Youth I am sure will never turn from the Childe. 

And the spell of that strong spirit is freshly 
revived for me by the sight of this page which his 
own hand traced, under the full current of inspira- 
tion. Heigh-ho! once upon a time I knew dozens 
of these stanzas by heart, especially those dealing 
with the love scrapes of Juan, and my naughty 
schoolmates used to bribe me to recite them. I 
had to read the book by stealth, my father regard- 
ing Byron as the Devil himself! I have never 
thought to forbid him to my own children, and 
in point of fact, I can't see the " Satanism " with 
which he has been charged. There be writers more 

[89] 



MANNAHATTA II 

dangerous than my Lord Byron, if I know any- 
thing of literature. And I'm glad I read him 
young, for no poetry has ever affected me with 
stronger impressions than parts of the " Don," 
Childe Harold, Mazeppa, the Siege of Corinth, 
Parisina, and the Prisoner of Chillon. 

Also I am glad that my Lord Byron lived before 
the typewriter; the poet working and transcribing 
with the pen is more apt to start miracles. 
Byron writes as with a sword; his script, bold, 
dashing, irregular, is entirely characteristic of his 
genius. 

I saw Byron's own copy of the first edition of 
the early cantos of "Don Juan," published by 
Galignani of Paris. The poet has made an auto- 
graph note where Don Alfonso is described as 
having surprised Juan with his wife. Ask Miss 
Greene to show it you; it's really worth while. 

Keats and Shelley are represented by manu- 
script originals of their choicest poems, and there 
is a lock of Keats's hair, brown and glossy as 
when it was cut from his head. Upon first seeing 
it, the late Richard Watson Gilder fainted and 
Charles Hanson Towne threw off a sonnet on the 
spot. It is perhaps the most expensive lock of 
[90] 



IN NUBIBUS 

hair in the world. Oh, it is useful to have money; 
if you wish to collect such things. 

I like to think of the great J. Pierpont Morgan 
recreating himself among these literary treasures, 
and having the " Christmas Carol " read to him 
from the author's manuscript. It's a picture that 
inclines one to believe, after all, in the essential 
humanness of our millionaires — a thing that is 
popularly scouted. But then, Mr. Morgan was 
a man of genius! . 

IN NUBIBUS 

GENTLE READER, if you are thinking 
perchance that we have sometimes dived low 
in the preceding pages, seeking life at its rankest 
and fullest, I propose to soar high with you as a 
fitting climax to this truthful narrative. Take a 
long breath, for you will need your best wind. 
Now then! . . . 

Up — up — up amid the clouds and the keen 
sunshine, eight hundred feet above the solid ground 
of Manhattan; higher than the builders of Babel 
climbed in their impious project to outwit the 
watchful Yahveh. 

[91] 



MANNAHATTA II 

Steady, my reader! — we have shot up sixty 
stories, and are now standing on the topmost tur- 
ret of the Woolworth Building, the greatest of 
the stone giants of New York and, I dare say, 
taken all-in-all, the most wonderful structure 
dedicate to business uses in the world. 

In the foregoing pages I have sought to avoid 
the subject of money and especially millions of 
money, which is mouthed to disgust by the news- 
papers and New York guide-books, etc. But here 
I am content to mark an exception. For high as 
we have ascended, we can't get above this fact — 
that the Woolworth was builded of the nickels 
and dimes of the plain American people! It is 
of these nickels and dimes poured forth from 
thousands of scanty purses that I think rather 
than of the celebrated Five-Million-Dollar check 
which Mr. Woolworth is said to have given in 
part payment for his building. Dear man, he 
must have had many a white night while raising 
his Jacob's Ladder to heaven with the small coins 
of the poor. But his achievement more than repaid 
him, we may well believe; it exemplifies the 
romance of commerce which we owe now and then 
to exceptional men. Certainly the Woolworth 
[92] 



IN NUBIBUS 

ranks with the half-dozen most wonderful sights 
of New York. It is not simply an immense stone 
cylinder raised on a framework of steel, as many 
of these great buildings are: it has beauty and 
harmony of parts in an uncommon degree, and 
an individuahty of style which literally puts it in 
a class by itself. In a word, the architecture of 
the Woolworth exhibits genius instead of daring 
of the freak order, which latter we are too much 
used to expect. I know of nothing in New York 
to compare with the effect the rich and yet 
grandly simple fa9ade produces. As splendid 
as a battleship, I would say — if I may be allowed 
the simile. (This merely as a parenthesis while 
the reader is getting his second wind.) 

Looking from our lofty turret, we seem to be 
in the car of a balloon, so great is the height, while 
the mighty Metropolis at our feet is dwindled to 
a checker-board. 

Far below us a golden ball sparkles — it is the 
dome of the " World " Building, not so many years 
ago reputed the chief wonder of this section of 
Manhattan. Soaring many stories higher, but still 
falling far short of our supreme isolation, is the 
Titan that men name the Singer Building; and 

[93] 



MAISTNAHATTA II 

more remote we mark the graceful campanile of 
the Metropolitan, outstripped by us a sheer hun- 
dred feet. All other so-called sky-scrapers, tre- 
mendous and towering, regarded from an ordinary 
standpoint, have dropped out of the race ad 
nubes. The Woolworth is first and the rest — 
nowhere ! 

Here be altitudes, my masters. From this 
wind-crannying eyrie how comically shrunken and 
diminished appear many of the Great City's mar- 
vels! Old Jacob of the Silver Ladder, you are 
spoiling a lot of poetry for us. Down there in 
the harbour, sadly shorn of majesty from our pride 
o' place, rises (should I not rather say, sinks?) 
Liberty with her torch. Certes, she appears to be 
going down, from past conceptions, for she is full 
five hundred feet below us; yet, pedestal and all, 
she reaches the respectable stature of three hun- 
dred feet! 

Everything seems reduced on the same scale — 
we are Brobdingnagians looking down upon 
Lilliput. The far-famed Brooklyn Bridge? — tut, 
tut, a mere hand's breadth, and the East River — 
a puny creek. Mighty ships ride at anchor in the 
Bay, but they appear as cock-boats from this 
[94] 



IN NUBIBUS 

height — we are looking through the wrong end 
of the glass for wonderment. 

Lower Manhattan seems paved with children's 
playing blocks — these are the houses and ordinary 
structures. We look straight down on Park Place 
and Broadway: — automobiles flit about, ant-size, 
and our fellow-humans are too small to be taken 
into account. It is the megalomania of the gods, 
for nothing below seems equal to ourselves or even 
worthy of our notice. 

No sounds reach us from the turmoil of traffic, 
the roar of the human diapason in the streets far 
beneath — yet is it the noisiest quarter of the Great 
City; not a wave mounts to us from the leaping 
human tempest where Stentor could scarce make 
himself audible. We have won to the silence of 
the greater heights. 

Even so the gods must look down from Olym- 
pus, despising the ant-like beings on the earth, who 
think to reach them with their vain prayers and 
to propitiate them with foolish adoration: from 
their supreme height, hearing not a whisper of the 
earthly tumult and untouched, save to laughter 
and contempt, by all the vicissitudes of the human 
spectacle. . . . 

[95] 



MANNAHATTA II 

Guy de Maupassant tells us that he left Paris 
once for a long journey because he had commenced 
to fear the Eiffel Tower would fall upon him. 
Contrariwise, I felt that the Woolworth was quite 
solid and safe when regretfully, at the end of my 
seven days, I bade farewell to Mannahatta. Par- 
don! — Au revoir, of course. 



[96] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 
ONE 

BALZAC THE LOVER 

T "1 7RITING TO his beloved sister, Laure, 
▼ ▼ in the midst of his first obscure literary- 
efforts, Balzac said: " I have none of the flowers 
of life, and yet I am in the season when they 
bloom! What is the good of fortune and joys 
when youth is past? Of what use the actor's gar- 
ments if one does not play the role? The old man 
is one who has dined and looks at others eating. 
I am young and my plate is empty, and I am 
hungry, Laure! Will ever my two only, immense 
desires — to be famous and to be loved — ^be sat- 
isfied?" 

They were, in a fashion memorable enough — 
and this was the life- tragedy of Honore de Balzac. 

It is said that there have been nearly as many 
books, essays, monographs written upon the great 
French novelist as upon Shakespeare, and there 

[99] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

is yet no let-up to this torrent of literature called 
forth by one of the greatest of its masters. The 
fact is eloquent of the supremacy of Balzac, seeing 
that Shakespeare had over two hundred years the 
start of him and that he worked in what is 
regarded as a higher domain of letters. 

Scarcely less interesting is the fact that the 
greater part of the literature which in several 
tongues has swelled the Balzac " legend/' deals 
mainly with the man's life and personality. It 
is much to say, but the remark may be ventured, 
that the " Human Comedy " is in some danger 
of being eclipsed in point of interest by the author 
thereof. Sixty-six years after his death in a 
tragic despair that he was not suffered to com- 
plete his giant task, Balzac has entered upon a 
harvest of fame of which even he never dreamed. 
" Glory," he once wrote, " is the sun of the dead; " 
— that sun is now fully risen upon the builder of 
the " Human Comedy." 

BALZAC'S STUDIES of women in his novels, 
especially the greater ones, throw a vivid 
light upon his artistic daring and originality. 
Whatever faults of overdrawing might be charged 
[100] 



BALZAC THE LOVER 

to them, they must be recognized for what they 
were on their first appearance, — a new departure 
in fiction and the work of a master mind. In 
Balzac's gallery of women the daughters of Lilith 
abound more than the saints; we have nothing 
in English fiction to compare with them — as in 
truth, we have no writer (I do not say novelist, 
he was more than that) who has approached 
Balzac's achievement. In view, therefore, of the 
Frenchman's attitude toward the women of his 
books, the question of his personal relations with 
the enigmatic sex becomes of mordant interest. 

Thanks to the searchlight scrutiny to which the 
life and memorials of Balzac have been subjected 
in recent years, we have learned more than his con- 
temporaries knew or suspected. 

For one thing, we have discredited the legend 
of personal chastity and continence which he was at 
so great pains to set up concerning Honore de Bal- 
zac! He wished the world to believe that because 
of this virtue, very uncommon among Frenchmen, 
he was able to perform and to continue his im- 
mense labours. Chastity, he declared, was the se- 
cret reservoir of creative power, the source of those 
divinations which stamp the man of genius; it 

[101] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

even implied certain occult faculties, as he sought 
to show in " Cousin Pons." In conversation with 
his friends, as in his writings, the theme was a 
favourite one with our hero, and Gautier (who was 
not personally inclined toward the theory) tells 
us that a half -hour meeting with the Beloved once 
a year was the utmost indulgence Balzac would 
allow to a literary artist. He would not hear of 
instances of famous writers noted for their incon- 
tinence : — they had simply cheated themselves, was 
his position. Alas! like many a moralist, it doth 
not appear that his practice squared with his pre- 
cept; though admitting all that is brought forward 
concerning his " amours," it would be unfair to 
charge him with great libertinism. To this re- 
proach his amazing and unexampled literary pro- 
duction remains a sufficient answer. So good a 
judge of such matters as the famous George Sand 
seems to have taken him at his word, for she writes : 
" Moderate in every other respect, his life exhibited 
the purest morals, since he always dreaded licen- 
tiousness as the enemy of talent. He pursued 
chastity on principle, and his relations with the 
fair sex were those merely of curiosity." 

This is contradicted by Balzac's sister, Laure, 
[ 102 ] 



BALZAC THE LOVER 

who, with all her love for him, would not consent 
to any false touches in his portrait. "It is an 
error," she says, " to speak of his extreme modera- 
tion. He does not deserve this praise. Outside 
of his work, which was first and foremost, he loved 
and tasted all the pleasures of this world." 

By the way, our hero was not physically 
attracted by George Sand, though he admired her 
talents in a qualified degree and esteemed her as 
un hon camarade. We find him explaining to 
Madame Hanska that she had no ground to be 
jealous of the author of " Indiana," and for once 
he was probably telling the whole truth. George 
Sand, in complimenting his virtue, perhaps took 
the woman's view that what was not for her was 
not for another. 

The truth seems to be that Balzac was about as 
moral as the average Frenchman of his time, and 
though not a deliberate seeker of bonnes fortunes, 
his heroism fell short of putting aside those which 
came along, so to speak, in a proper way. Espe- 
cially he was not averse to forming very intimate 
relations with ladies of quality. Aristocracy was 
indeed a lifelong bait to the little great man, and 
one can fancy him in the shades almost deploring 

[ 103 ] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

his immense renown because people will drop the 
" de " from his name — a nobiliary particle to which 
he had no legitimate title. 

His first (recorded) love affair, with a Madame 
de Berny, helped to fix the aristocratic habit upon 
him to which he was inclined by his tastes and 
pretensions. He was then twenty-two and the 
lady was double his age, being the mother of nine 
children. Her husband was a man of noble lin- 
eage, and her father, a talented musician, had been 
in favour at the Court of Louis XVI. This affair 
probably saved him from some of the typical in- 
discretions of French youth, but for a contra, it 
undoubtedly stained his imagination: — the ghost 
of this maternal mistress rises in many of his 
pages devoted to the unsparing analysis of illicit 
passion. But it has a kinder and purer associa- 
tion with the heroine of the " Lily of the Valley," 
in writing the description of whose affecting death- 
bed scene Balzac confesses that he was moved to 
tears. 

Madame de Berny's husband was living at the 
time of this liaison, which terminated, without 
rupture, through a failure of ardour on the young 
man's side ; it appears not that Monsieur de Berny 
[104] 



BALZAC THE LOVER 

knew of the " romance." He was of the order of 
blind rather than complaisant husbands, and his 
wife is said to have taken a lover before Balzac. 
The Eighteenth century easiness of morals, espe- 
cially in correct society, was not yet exhausted. 

The Dilecta (Beloved), as Balzac called the 
mature lady of his affections, swayed him for a 
time by appealing to and fostering his literary 
ambition. She seems to have given him intelligent 
coimsels for the most part, and to have " moth- 
ered " him, as we say in our English idiom. She 
improved his manners, which were boisterously 
self-assertive and to the end somewhat vulgar, and 
she unluckily confirmed him in those aristocratic 
notions and royalist politics which, in the eyes of 
a later generation, often go far toward spoiling 
his work and making the writer absurd. Balzac 
from the outset of his career leaned upon women, 
gave them much and expected still more in return. 
It is notable that all his favourite heroes follow 
suit: — women and money are the rulers of their 
destiny as of his own. 

Madame de Berny, to repeat, had her share in 
the conception and ordering of the " Comedy." 
She aided him with her money in his first business 

[105] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

venture, which proved a failure, and thus laid the 
ply of that tendency of his to look to women for 
help, which more or less marked his whole after 
life. Finally, she was a good friend and a grate- 
ful mistress, and with the usual fatahty that rules 
such affairs, she introduced Balzac to her successor 
in his affections — the Duchesse de Castries. 

This was a high flight for a young man of 
twenty-five, without social or family titles (though 
he was now using the " de "), and who had as yet 
given no convincing proofs of talent, not to say 
genius. There is little room to doubt that the 
Duchesse became his very dear friend, but the 
story is mostly left to our imagination, as Balzac 
was chivalrously discreet in his af aires de coeur. 
The image of this noble dame is projected upon 
many a creation of Balzac's. Their romance, how- 
ever, is not given to us in its fulness, and it may 
not have overpassed the Platonic stage. Our hero 
could be discreet where the reputation of ladies 
of rank was concerned. But the Platonic reserva- 
tion can hardly be made in regard to Madame 
Visconti (an Englishwoman, by the way) whom 
the author drew upon for his hady Dudley in the 
" Lily of the Valley." Balzac declared to the lady 
[106] 



BALZAC THE LOVER 

whom he finally married that his friendship with 
the Visconti was a proper one. Posterity is in- 
clined to believe that he perjured himself like a 
gentleman. 

OUR HERO had reached the ripe age of 
thirty-two ere he miquestionably " arrived " 
with the " Physiology of Marriage " and " The 
Shagreen Skin " — books which, though not of his 
very best, fully justified the public reception of 
them. But even this first, long-awaited draught of 
the cordials of success did not satisfy Balzac; some- 
thing else was lacking, and he confides to his sister 
that he despairs of ever being loved and under- 
stood by the woman of his dreams, or of ever find- 
ing her, save in his heart! 

Like the old painter in his " Unknown Master- 
piece," it was Balzac's fate to hunger vainly for 
his ideal woman to the end, and in the final mo- 
ment of expected realization to grasp at a shadow! 

But there were to be consolations for him, and 
perhaps the most enviable of these was his affair 
with " Maria," which belongs to 1833, Balzac 
being then in his thirty-fourth year. She was a 
delightful girl of middle class station who, as our 

[107] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

hero himself tells us, fell to him like a flower from 
heaven, exacted neither correspondence nor 
attentions, and made only the sweet condition: 
" Love me a year and I will love you all my 
life!" 

Ah, Maria! — well had it heen for the great man 
could he have contented himself with your unsel- 
fish affection; but then we should lack the tragedy 
of Honore de Balzac. 

It was fortunate for literature that Balzac met 
this charming girl just at the first full flowering 
of his genius, as in all but one respect she served 
as a model for Eugenie Grandet, the most popular 
and beloved of his female characters. The few 
lines of dedication prefixed to this masterpiece are 
inscribed "To Maria"; lovely and sincere is the 
tribute : 

" Your portrait is the fairest ornament of this 
book, and here it is fitting that your name should 
be set, like the branch of box taken from some 
unknown garden to lie for a while in the holy 
water, and afterwards set by pious hands above 
the threshold, where the green spray, ever renewed, 
is a sacred talisman to ward off all evil from the 
house." 
[108] 



BALZAC THE LOVER 

This genuine, if illicit, romance ran its brief 
course, and Maria had her wish; also — an incident 
which romantic persons will not like so well — she 
bore our hero a child. Then we hear no more of 
her in the great man's life-story. But the thought 
of her gentle love, her kind, unselfish tenderness 
remains to sweeten the story of that checkered 
life in which there was not to fall another such 
"flower from heaven." Ah, Maria! . . . 

The conventional marriage in France is always 
a business arrangement, and it may be that the 
*' accidents " of love are less ceremoniously 
regarded there than such things are among 
English-speaking races. At any rate, Balzac is 
allowed to have begotten four natural children 
i( including Maria's daughter) as a result of his 
casual love passages. Their history is lost in the 
obscurity that usually envelops such unfortunates, 
and no explosions of the paternal genius have 
occurred to betray their identity to the French 
people. 

Balzac had in Ms make-up no little of the 
dandy* — it was one of his superficial qualities 

*Dickens, who presents some strong points of likeness to Balzac, 
both in his character and work, was also given to a loud style of 
dress and much jewelry. Henley calls lum the "Almighty Swell." 

[109] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

which men like Oscar Wilde made a hoast of 
imitating. There were periods when he seemed 
anxious to shine as a man of fashion (the dandy- 
ism of Byron was still a living tradition) and, 
despite his rather ungallant figure — he was in 
stature only five feet two inches, with a mighty 
head and the torso of Hercules — aimed at a fop- 
pish distinction of dress. We hear of his tailor, 
his jeweller and his goldsmith being lavishly levied 
upon to " exploit " this phase of the great man. 
Madame Delphine Gay wrote a book about his 
famous jewel-headed cane, which figures even 
more memorably in Danton's comic statue of our 
hero. In his first flush of prosperity he set up a 
coach with a gigantic Jehu and (in the English 
fashion then reigning) a tiny groom whom he 
called " Millet-seed." He loved to " derive " him- 
self from noble ancestors and he made a dead set 
at the company of the well-born. His duchesses 
and countesses seemed as necessary to his existence 
as to his art, in which he constantly invoked them. 
In sum, I fear it must be allowed that our hero 
was a great deal of a snob, though he was not 
offensive in the English or Thackerayan degree, 
and this phase of character was not always preju- 
[110] 



BALZAC THE LOVER 

dicial to his literary work. In certain of his crea- 
tions his penchant for the " nobility " is splendidly 
justified. 

This trait appeared even in the artist at work, 
but here it gives us only pleasure when we regard 
the sum and quality of his achievement; even as 
his boisterous egotism is similarly justified. He 
planned his living quarters with the same minute 
care that marks his description of the habitations 
of people in the " Comedy." Greatest care of all 
was shown in providing for his study — a real 
sanctum dedicate to the holy toil of creation. 
Perfect quietude was the first requisite — ^he seems 
to have dreaded noise as much as Carlyle. At 
his desk he wore a white Dominican gown with 
hood, adapting the material thereof for winter 
and summer. His feet were shod with embroid- 
ered slippers, and his waist was girt with a rich 
Venetian-gold chain ("All the elegance of life is 
about the waist," he writes somewhere), to which 
were suspended a pair of scissors, a paper-knife 
and a gold pen-knife, all beautifully carved. His 
living and working quarters — and this refers to 
his several homes — were always furnished in char- 
acteristic taste and usually at a cost that goes far 

[111] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

to explain his constant financial embarrassments. 
His regular habit was to go to bed at six o'clock 
in the evening and rise at midnight to his work; 
but whatever his working hours, he wrote by 
candlelight, heavy curtains always excluding the 
daylight from his study. When absorbed in the 
writing of a book, his isolation was more than 
monastic; he read no letters and received no 
callers, sometimes lengthening the creative effort 
during a stretch of eighteen hours. But the great 
toiler's claustration was not absolute even at such 
times, though he wished that the world might 
so believe: not infrequently it was broken by the 
visits of the Beloved. A secret door and staircase 
admitted her at the novelist's house in the Rue 
Cassini. Thus Balzac both lived and wrote his 
romances — a perilous duality of existence which 
few writers have attempted with success. In the 
case of Balzac it was to have a tragic conclusion 
that is without a rival in the creations of his art. 

ENTER NOW L'Etrangere (The Stranger), 
the woman who was to dominate the rest of 
Balzac's life, that is to say, the greater part of 
his literary career. She was the Countess Evelina 
[112] 



BALZAC THE LOVER 

Hanska, wife of a Polish nobleman living in the 
Ukraine. First attracted to Balzac by his studies 
of women, she sought to know him through a 
correspondence in which she for a time veiled her 
identity. The story of their relations culmuiating 
sixteen years afterward in marriage, is known to 
all readers of the novelist's Letters. He wrote to 
her almost daily for many years, pouring forth 
all his plans, struggles, hopes, ambitions with much 
of the fiery ardour which he gave to his creative 
work. She had borne four children to the hus- 
band who was twenty-five years her senior, but of 
these only one, a daughter, survived. Indifference 
toward her noble consort was a prime motive in 
drawing her to Balzac, and very early in their 
correspondence she permitted the latter to divine 
her real feelings. On the lovers first meeting in 
Switzerland, the Count showed himself as incon- 
venient as the husband is apt to be in such affairs. 
"Alas!" wrote Balzac to his sister — "he did not 
quit us during five days for a single second. He 
went from his wife's skirts to my waistcoat. And 
Neufchatel is a small town where a woman, an 
illustrious foreigner, cannot take a step without 
being seen. Constraint doesn't suit me ! " 

[113] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFEREISTCES 

He was transported with his new affinity and 
believed that he had found at last the woman of 
his dreams. " I am happy, very happy," he con- 
fesses to his dear Laure, the fond sister whose 
love condoned all his errors. " She is twenty- 
seven, has most beautiful black hair, the smooth 
and deliciously fine skin of brunettes, a lovely little 
hand, and is naive and imprudent to the point 
of embracing me before every one. I say 
nothing about her great wealth. What is it in 
comparison with beauty? I am intoxicated with 
love!" 

Such was the beginning of this celebrated 
romance, auspicious enough in spite of its illicit 
conditions, and bearing no hint of the tragic con- 
clusion. But the close student of Balzac will be 
halted at once by this first reference to Madame 
Hanska's wealth. The reticence of the woman, 
and the loss or destruction of all her letters to 
Balzac (which she appears to have decreed her- 
self), leave the story perplexed beyond hope of 
a final and authentic explanation. But there can 
be little doubt that the question of money, which 
constantly occupied the actual and imaginative 
existence of the novelist, furnishes the clue to the 
[ 114 ] 



BALZAC THE LOVER 

catastrophe. The famous pair who had loved each 
other so long and so ardently, in spite of moral 
and legal hindrances, were not to find happiness 
in marriage. They had mutually deceived each 
other. Madame Hanska was less rich than she 
had allowed Balzac to believe and reckon upon; 
on the other hand, his debts were far heavier than 
he had confessed to her. Balzac was always in- 
capable of strictly envisaging his financial position, 
as he habitually mistook the riches of his mind for 
available assets. Moreover, the flower of their 
youth was behind them and of their love as well, 
for the marriage of the church had nothing to 
give these lovers. They who have eaten their cake 
may not have it. 

But they had loved well, and it is the romantic 
side of their story that we are concerned with. In 
spite of the husband's jealous vigilance they were 
able to correspond and even to meet at infrequent 
intervals; when the good man went off the job, 
some half-dozen years after their first meeting, 
there was no more restraint than the lady's social 
position demanded. Balzac now passed frequent 
holidays with her, and she visited him in Paris; 
one visit being attended by an accident * that 

[115] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

leaves no question of the extreme intimacy of 
their relations. It is true, however, that they 
had undergone a long Platonic probation, and to 
this Balzac alludes in a letter urging Madame 
Hanska to fix the date of their marriage. 
Writing to her on his birthday, he adds 
a prayer himiorously addressed to his patron 
saint : 

" O great Saint Honore, thou to whom is dedi- 
cated a street in Paris at once so beautiful and so 
ugly . . . ordain that I may be no more a bache- 
lor, by the decree of the mayor or the Consul of 
France; for thou knowest that I have been spir- 
itually married for nigh on eleven years. These 
last fifteen years I have lived a martyr's life. God 
sent me an angel in 1838. May this angel never 
quit me again till death! I have lived by my 
writing. Let me live a little by love! Take care 
of her rather than of me, for I would fain give her 
all, even to my portion in heaven. And especially, 
let us soon be happy. Ave^ Eva! " 

This was in 1843, and he had to wait seven 
years longer. All his biographers agree that the 

* There is little doubt that Madame Hanska was prematurely- 
confined at Balzac's house in Passy, a suburb of Paris, August, 
1845. 

[116] 



BALZAC THE LOVER 

difficile J, indeed somewhat perverse, coquetry of 
Madame Hanska on the marriage question, and 
the wearisome probation to which she subjected 
him, were potent factors in wrecking Balzac's 
health and causing his untimely death. 

Beware the woman who tastes a malign pleasure 
in making you wait and stints the generosity of 
love; she is apt to be your fate and your undoing! 

T)ALZAC has confessed that he could do 
-*--' nothing without the inspiration of female at- 
tachment: — to his famous dictum on chastity 
he added the permission to write love letters as 
forming an author's style! It is almost incredible 
how much he gave of himself in this way, while 
keeping up a rate of literary production that 
averaged four books for every year of his work- 
ing life. He sought the sympathy of women as 
an aid to his work — as the spring which released 
the creative faculties and fructified his dreams. 
To Madame Hanska he avows — and we need not 
regard this as unmixed flattery: " The desire to 
see you makes me invent things that do not ordi- 
narily come into my head. It's not only cour- 
age you give me to support the difficulties 

[117] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

of life; you give me also talent — at any rate, 
facility." 

His Eve was often jealous, owing to rumours 
that occasionally reached her from Paris, and she 
failed to attach due weight to his vaunted dogma 
of chastity, which he exploits in his letters, even 
to the prejudice of such a contemporary as Victor 
Hugo.* But she probably did not expect him to 
be a St. Anthony, from the conditions of his life 
and temperament, and she had brains enough to 
discern the value of the man who wrote such won- 
derful letters for her amusement. And then 
Balzac knew how to appease her wrath, if not to 
quiet her suspicions. He had the Frenchman's 
knack of humbling himself before the woman he 
desired to please, without any real self -derogation ; 
and he could flatter his proud mistress in such 
lyrical terms as these: 

"Adieu, loved friend, to whom I belong like the 
sound to the bell, the dog to his master, the artist 
to his ideal, prayer to God, pleasure to cause, 
colour to the painter, life to the sun. Love me, 

*"Much of his (Hugo's) force, value and quality he has lost 
by the life he leads, having overdone his devotion to Venus." 
Balzac to Madame Hanska. 

[118] 



BALZAC THE LOVER 

for I need your affection, so vivifying, so agree- 
able, so celestial, so ideally good, of such sweet 
dominance, and so constantly vibrating! " 

Balzac vras united to his Eve in March, 1850. 
His health was now broken by his enormous liter- 
ary labours, and the lady had been won tardily to 
give her consent; it is difficult not to believe that 
she foresaw the dissensions at hand. The bride- 
groom, however, was almost wild with delight, 
and he fancied that he had never known happi- 
ness before. " I have had no flowery spring," he 
wrote to his friend, Madame Carraud, " but I 
shall have the most brilliant of summers, the mild- 
est of autumns." 

Toward the end of May the wedded pair ar- 
rived in Paris (the marriage had taken place on 
the bride's estate in Poland), and at evening drove 
to the fine mansion which Balzac had purchased 
and fitted up with splendid furniture, rare and 
costly works of art, etc. The house was dark, to 
their surprise and annoyance, and they had great 
trouble forcing an entrance with the aid of some 
strangers. A more painful shock awaited them : — 
the valet left in charge had gone mad, and was 

[119] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

discovered spilling the wine and wrecking the fur- 
niture. A portentous home-coming! 

Ill in body and sick at heart, for he was already- 
estranged from his wife, Balzac took to his bed 
of the malady which ended his life in August of 
that year (1850). The story of his pleading with 
the doctor for one year's grace of life in order that 
he might put the finishing touches to his literary 
testament — ^then for six months — six weeks — six 
days, and even six hours, may not be literally 
exact, but it persists as characteristic of the im- 
daunted artist. The Countess remained in her 
apartments while he was dying alone, suffering 
terribly and much disfigured by dropsy; Victor 
Hugo, who called at the house and found the great 
man in his agony, has so witnessed. One is divided 
between pity for the giant stricken down in the 
midst of his creative labours and sorrow for the 
grim ending of the romance which had filled his 
heart during so many years. It seems such a trag- 
edy as only he could have depicted. 

The noble widow paid off Balzac's debts to the 
last centime and settled a comfortable annuity 
upon his mother. She vouchsafed no explanation 
of the estrangement and nothing on her part was 
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BALZAC THE LOVER 

ever divulged. One is inclined to admire her 
proud silence, but to this hour the world blames 
her, mainly on the ground that after Balzac's 
death she took a lover in the artist, Jean Gigoux, 
who painted a well-known portrait of her. One 
studies the picture long, seeking to trace in the 
proud and noble beauty a clue to the soul of the 
woman who broke the heart of Balzac. 

O Eve! O woman! — ^must thy destiny be al- 
♦ ways to betray? . . . 

Balzac's widow survived him thirty years, dy- 
ing in 1882. It must be set down to her credit 
that she wished to convert their fine house, the 
Hotel de Beau j on, into a permanent memorial of 
the author, and began some necessary alterations 
with this end in view. On her death, however, 
the property was purchased by the Baroness Salo- 
mon de Rothschild, who demolished the house in 
order to incorporate the ground site with her own 
gardens. An ironic detail that will not fail to 
impress the attentive reader of Balzac. Money 
has the last word in his legend! 

And voila, a story after the Master's own heart. 
Is it not somewhere written in the " Comedy"? 

[ 121 ] 



TWO 



BALZAC THE AETIST 



IN THE preceding paper critical questions 
would have been improper and were, therefore, 
avoided; but as we had much to say on Balzac's re- 
lations with women as influencing and colouring 
his art, I wish now to note his attitude toward his 
creations generally. And this the more that I 
believe an injustice is done him by the run of 
English critics who maintain that he has over- 
stressed the evil in human nature and thereby 
flawed the integrity of his work. Even Mr. Saints- 
bury, who has done so much for the English un- 
derstanding of Balzac, is not without qualms and 
doubts on this score ; for the Englishman is a mor- 
alist before anything else, and yet he will not 
hesitate to judge a Frenchman to whom art was 
the supreme consideration! 

I am of George Moore's opinion, that Balzac's 
achievement as a whole is scarcely inferior to any 
work of the human mind. I beheve that in the 
[122 1 



BALZAC THE ARTIST 

creation of veritable human types, in the mastery 
of passion, synthetic grasp of life, and profound 
divination of motive, with the ability to exhibit 
these powers and faculties in a drama of com- 
pelling interest and original invention, which offers 
the unexpected turns of reality itself — Balzac has 
no equal among the novelists of the world. 

To consider only our own literature and the 
giants thereof — Scott, Dickens and Thackeray — 
the fame of the first-named is so greatly dimin- 
ished and his books are so generally neglected to- 
day that it seems needless to urge the comparison. 
Whatever be the merits of Scott's works — and 
no books were in their time more famous or more 
praised — they seem to lack the principle of life 
which keeps the world ever freshly interested in 
Balzac. As for Dickens or Thackeray, these great 
writers amuse us with their humour and satire, or 
touch us with pathos, or delight us with sketches 
of character, throughout their numerous produc- 
tions. But will any competent critic pretend that 
in the stern business of reproducing life in its po- 
tential reality and passion in its hidden play — of 
making men and women whose destinies thrill us 
like those of people we have known, and even more, 

[123] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

for such art transcends our actual experience while 
borrowing its verity therefrom — will any good 
critic assert that the achievement of Balzac in this 
wise has been fairly matched by either Thackeray 
or Dickens? We do not expect that Taine, a 
Frenchman, would allow it, but even the thor- 
oughly English Mr. Saintsbury forbears to make 
this claim. In point of strict, uncomplimentary 
fact, the work of the famous Englishmen named, 
as compared with that of Balzac, might be ex- 
pressed in one of Dickens's titles, " The Lazy Tour 
of Two Idle Apprentices " ; and this is said by one 
who is proud to call himself their lifelong lover 
and admirer! Neither of these admirable writers 
was dominated by the artistic idea in a degree at 
all comparable with Balzac, nor has either of them 
brought to the making of a novel anything like 
the amount of brains which the Frenchman put 
into his greater books. Please observe that I 
mean brains — intellectual and creative force rather 
than literary grace or merit of any sort palliative 
of artistic shortcoming or inability to hit the mark. 
Both Dickens and Thackeray are not seldom de- 
lightful in their conceded failures. What charm- 
ing digressions in the " Philip," yes, even in the 
[124] 



BALZAC THE ARTIST 

more formidable "Virginians," and where is 
Dickens more savourously himself than in parts 
of " Little Dorrit " and " Our Mutual Friend," 
both books that defy artistic classification? 

The difference between the French master and 
these great English writers is mainly an artistic 
one. They have many fine qualities and literary 
merits, but strictly speaking, they never have a 
story — well, let us say, almost never. Dickens at 
least was on the way to achieving it. Was it in- 
dolence or incapacity or want of the artistic in- 
stinct that caused their failure? I cannot say, 
and the point may be indifferent to English 
readers, since Thackeray's style and Dickens's 
humour are readily accepted in lieu of a story. 
It is otherwise with Balzac, to whom creation and 
construction were all, who imposed a rule of ar- 
tistic brevity upon himself, and thought out his 
novel completely before sketching the first chap- 
ter. Nearly always he has a good story and not 
seldom a great one — the mechanism of plot, the 
interplay of passion and all human motives merely 
regarded. Yet Balzac is not weak or inferior in 
other respects because of his cunning structure, his 
deep-laid architectonics. Each story is informed 

[125] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

with a vital thought and philosophy as necessary 
to it as air to the lungs. It is doubtful if any 
writer of fiction ever possessed the same capacity 
for abstract thought, united with a like power to 
reproduce the actual drama of life. 

OSCAR WILDE remarked (after Baude- 
laire) that even the servants in Balzac's 
novels have genius, and it is true that his char- 
acters generally are by this trait unmatched in 
modern fiction; that is to say, their creator has 
charged them with his own force and fire. But 
while they possess this uncommon life, they are 
not all of a piece, so to say, but cunningly dif- 
ferentiated; no two of his rascals or honest folk, 
though of similar type, are the same in essence. 
Now as there are about two thousand living 
people in the " Comedy," the simple fact just 
stated estabhshes the immense creative power of 
Balzac. 

There is yet another way of coming at the ques- 
tion of his supremacy, which idea (if the reader 
please !) is original with the present humble critic. 
When Balzac prepares a contest or an intrigue 
among his people, he arms both sides with such 
[126] 



BALZAC THE ARTIST 

resources of talent and courage, of resolution and 
finesse, of check and countercheck, that the reader 
is transported as before a living drama. Perhaps 
the biggest novelist you can think of could take one 
side of a Balzacian situation or duel of this kind, 
but the effort would surely exhaust him. Alone 
the Master can handle both ! Observe, I make the 
point that there is very much more than literature 
in the novels of Balzac. There have been some 
infertile stylists who thought they could re-write 
Balzac's books to their betterment, but literary 
graces are of small value compared to the creative 
content of the " Human Comedy.'* The man who 
carried a world in his brain may be indulged now 
and then in a slight lapse or obscurity — we 
have had to pardon a great deal more even to 
Shakespeare ! 

For my part I find every species of literary 
style and merit in Balzac, but the fiery fugue of 
his invention, the constant marvel of his divining 
genius always draws me from the form to the sub- 
stance, even if I read him in French. To the giant 
labouring at the furnace of creation, to the great 
artist evoking and individualizing a vast multitude 
of souls and finding for them appropriate des- 

[127] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

tinies, the matter of literary form seemed less ex- 
igent no doubt than it did and does to writers 
whose " style " is all their capital. In art there 
is room for a Balzac as well as a Bourget, but we 
must not lose sight of the major values. Like 
Arthur Symons, I can say that Balzac's style 
seems always adequate to me — when the wonder 
of his creative power gives me leave to think of 
it. The question, however, is one of little or no 
significance to the English reader who can obtain 
our author in a good translation. 

Something was said in the previous paper in 
regard to the working habits of Balzac, and 
especially as to the seclusion and quiet, the 
almost cloistral freedom from interruption and 
distraction with which he guarded his creative 
^ask. In this aspect no writer of whom we have 
knowledge interests us so much, for the reason 
that Balzac's labours were as heroic as his genius 
was undoubted. Now in the country, now in 
the heart of Paris he raised his Ivory Tower, 
cutting himself off from society in order to see 
it with the i^-ray of imagination. He worked as 
if in a hallucination or creative trance, jealously 
limiting his hours of sleep, desisting only from. 
[128] 



BALZAC THE ARTIST 

complete exhaustion. At all times he seemed to 
be persuaded of the actual existence of his char- 
acters. To Jules Sandeau, speaking of his sister's 
illness, he repHed with an apparent lack of feeling: 
" Let us come back to reality — let us talk of 
Eugenie Grandet/" 

This is proof, not of his selfishness (as has been 
asserted) but of his complete absorption in the 
imaginative world. The clairvoyant always domi- 
nated in Balzac, and herein I think is the supreme 
attraction of his work. 

There have been men of great literary or artistic 
genius who were idle or reluctant or indifferent 
workers; the world is in the habit of making apol- 
ogy for them, feeling that they could have done 
better had they tried. Balzac never asked this 
kind of indulgence for himself and he would not 
hear of it for others. His immense interest for 
us lies in the fact that he was at once a great origi- 
nal genius and an amazing, almost unrivalled, 
worker. 

Let us notice his own theories of work and in- 
spiration; he has set them forth without reserve in 
" Cousine Bette," and as an artistic credo there is 
nothing to compare with them. This little manual 

[ 129 ] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

of Balzac's artistic faith and practice is contained 
within two or three pages — ^golden maxims to those 
who are capable of receiving and profiting by 
them. For the young artist and literary aspirant 
I take these counsels of Balzac to be the most 
valuable ever written; the words of a man for 
whom genius had done much, but who regarded 
the richest endowments of mind and spirit as 
worthless without constant labour and application. 
In truth, since his day, the world has had less 
patience than formerly with the gifted idler or 
faineant in art, and it now demands production 
as the proof of genius. 

To begin with. Courage is the word! accord- 
ing to Balzac. I summarize: 

" Intellectual work, labour in the upper regions 
of mental effort, is one of the grandest achieve- 
ments of man. That which deserves real glory 
in Art — for by Art we must understand every 
creation of the mind — is courage above all things, 
a sort of courage of which the vulgar have no 
conception. 

" Perpetual work is the Law of Art, as it is the 
law of life, for Art is idealized creation. Hence 
great artists and poets wait neither for commis- 
[ 130 ] 



BALZAC THE ARTIST 

sions nor purchasers. They are constantly creat- 
ing — to-day, to-morrow, always. The result is the 
habit of work, the unfailing apprehension of the 
difficulties which keep them in close intercourse 
with the Muse and her productive forces. Canova 
lived in his studio, as Voltaire lived in his study; 
so must Homer and Phidias have lived. 

" To nurse, to dream, to conceive of fine works 
is a delightful occupation — it is like smokmg en- 
chanted cigarettes. The work then floats in all the 
grace of infancy, in the wild joy of conception. 
. . . But gestation, fruition, the laborious rear- 
ing of the offspring, putting it to bed every night 
full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morn- 
ing with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's 
heart, licking it clean, dressing it a hundred times 
in the richest garb only to be instantly destroyed; 
then never to be cast down at the convulsions of 
this headlong life till the living masterpiece is 
perfected which in sculpture speaks to every eye, 
in literature to every intellect, in painting to every 
memory, in music to every heart ! This is the task 
of execution. 

" The habit of creativeness, the indefatigable 
love of motherhood which makes a mother — that 
miracle of nature which Raphael so well under- 
stood — the maternity of the brain, in short, so dif- 
ficult to develop, is lost with prodigious ease. 

[131] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

" Inspiration is the opportunity of genius. She 
does not indeed dance on the razor's edge; she is 
in the air and flies away with the swiftness of a 
crow; she wears no scarf by which the poet can 
clutch her; her hair is a flame; she vanishes like 
the lovely rose and the white flamingo — the sports- 
man's despair." 

And hearken to this, O you writers and artists 
of little courage, who content yourselves with an 
elegant dilettanteism — you faint-hearted lovers 
who fear to come to close grips with the Muse! 

" If the artist does not throw himself into his 
work as Curtius sprang into the gulf, as a soldier 
leads a forlorn hope without a moment's thought, 
and if when he is in the crater he does not dig on 
as a miner does when the earth has fallen in on 
him; if he contemplates the difficulties before him 
instead of conquering them one by one, like the 
lovers in fairy tales, who to win their princesses 
overcome ever-new enchantments — ^the work re- 
mains incomplete; it perishes in the studio where 
creativeness becomes impossible, and the artist 
looks on at the suicide of his own talent." 



[132] 



BALZAC THE ARTIST 

THESE THEORIES are exemplified by 
the sculptor Steinbock (" Cousine Bette "), 
gifted, but without will or courage or persistence, 
who talked admirably about art and in the eyes 
of the world maintained his reputation as a great 
artist by his powers of conversation and criticism. 
Balzac calls such men " half -artists " and admits 
that they even seem superior to the true artists, 
who are taxed with conceit, selfishness, contempt 
for the laws of society. But he adds, great men 
are the slaves of their work. 

In point of richness and fertility of ideas Balzac 
has no peer among writers of fiction; he pours 
them forth in all his books, and the stream rarely 
shows a falling off, but seems always at the fulL 
This inexhaustible fecundity of thought is, I think, 
peculiar to him. True, it tempts him to many a 
digression which in such a writer, say, as Walter 
Scott, one would skip sans apology. But some of 
Balzac's richest ore is to be found in his excur- 
sions from the main theme. I need instance only 
the famous chapter on the occult sciences in 
" Cousin Pons," the episode of the brothers 

[133] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

Ruggieri in " Catherine de' Medici," and the 
matchless chronicle of Napoleon in the " Country 
Doctor." . . . 

Was there ever a man so enormously interested 
in life — for whom no subject was too great or too 
small? Religion, politics, government, law, medi- 
cine, economics, mesmerism, astrology, second- 
sight, alchemy, criminology — this is to name but 
a few of the subjects he has touched, and memor- 
ably touched, in his books. Some of his penetrat- 
ing thoughts have since his time fructified in the 
domain of occult science; the charlatanism of 
which he was accused by certain critics, on account 
of his interest in the " forbidden sciences " and his 
partiality for treating of these in his books, is now 
judged to have been a legitimate exercise of his 
great powers. It is true that some of his " pet 
notions " have been hardly dealt with since his 
day, and as a social prophet he failed to reckon 
sufficiently with forces that are now big with des- 
tiny in his own France. Balzac was in truth far 
from infallible — a genius constantly in eruption is 
bound to throw off much scoriae for which the 
world has no use. But that he is always pregnant, 
suggestive, interesting, who will deny, or that his 
[134] 



BALZAC THE ARTIST 

idiosyncrasy makes up for his worst blunders and 
least attractive "manias"? 

Of the debt which writers since his time have con- 
tracted toward Balzac, it is needless to say much; 
no worker in fiction has escaped his influence. He 
is the founder of the modern novel as he remains 
its greatest master ; later writers have modified his 
methods, but all have learned from him and ap- 
propriated without scruple. 

George Moore remarks that Maupassant merely 
cut him up into walking sticks! Daudet and 
others have made such use of the " Comedy " as 
their abilities or their hmitations permitted; many 
a pretentious structure has been raised of materials 
borrowed from the Balzacian pyramid. Among 
English writers of high rank, Thackeray is his 
greatest debtor, having indeed learned of the 
French master some of the best lessons of his 
art. Even Dickens's debt is large, and it is worth 
noting that with more generosity than the author of 
" Vanity Fair," he has acknowledged the suprem- 
acy of Balzac. Coming down to our time, Robert 
Louis Stevenson was an unwearied student of 
Balzac and a cordial appreciator of his genius; 
Mr. Saintsbury allows that this ingenious and ad- 

[135] 



Jr'ORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

mired writer owed to Balzac some of his happiest 
conceptions. In fine, the great work of the 
Frenchman has been as a quarry to two genera- 
tions of industrious artists — and artisans! 

A SERIOUS charge against Balzac is that he 
-^^^ has libelled human nature, representing its 
evil possibilities by types of character that are ab- 
horrent to the general conscience and not justifiable 
by the canons of Art. In other words, it is held 
that Balzac has no right to introduce us to 
such people as Hulot and Bette, the Marnefes, 
Philippe Bridau, Flore Brazier, et ah: their de- 
pravity is overdrawn and, in any event, it is not fit 
for our eyes or nostrils. This, of course, is rather 
the English than the French position — (though it 
is not without a strong voicing in France, where 
the virtuous bourgeoisie know little more of our au- 
thor than Eugenie Grandet and JJrsule Mirouet). 
English sentiment requires a compromise in deal- 
ing with such specimens of human baseness and 
perversity, which was no part of Balzac's artistic 
method. His practice may have limited his popu- 
larity-^it will always limit his acceptance among 
English readers — but it affirms his greatness as 
[136] 



BALZAC THE ARTIST 

a master painter of life. His own words on this 
point are memorable. When his sister remon- 
strated with him in regard to his evil characters, 
urging him to modify them or turn them to better 
courses, he replied: " They can't change, my dear. 
They are fathomers of abysses; but they will be 
able to guide others. The wisest persons are not 
always the best pilots. It's not my fault. I 
haven't invented human nature. I observe it, in 
past and present; and I try to depict it as it is. 
Impostures in this kind persuade no one." 

Again, if during the serial publication of a story 
he were entreated to save some guilty one or black 
sheep among his creations — the sentimental public 
being much given to such appeals — he would ex- 
claim : " Don't bother me. Truth above all. Those 
people have no backbone. What happens to them 
is inevitable. So much the worse for them ! " 

This is somewhat different from the legend 
which represents Dickens as letting the sentimen- 
tal public decide the fate of his characters. 

" Cousine Bette " is a noxious dose even for the 
fanatic Balzacian, and in truth this book lacks 
moral beauty to a point of being almost pathologi- 
cal — on first reading it, I thought myself wander- 

[137] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

ing through the streets of Hell! Nevertheless, the 
art of the book is as great as it is terrible, and Mr. 
Saintsbury is one English critic who concedes the 
fact, ranking it with the greatest parts of the 
" Comedy." No doubt it is his English patriotism 
which inclines him to prefer Becky Sharp to Va- 
lerie Marnefe, but we need not forget that the 
latter " flower of evil " has even a more doughty 
champion in Taine. Valerie is in truth one of the 
most finished characters of Balzac; she may be less 
" respectable," but she is fully as convincing as 
Becky, though not, of course, equally acceptable 
from an English point of view. Does Balzac 
realize his wicked heroine more intensely, favoured 
to this end, as he was, by the greater license ac- 
corded him? I am not sure, but I fancy she 
stays with us longer. Hulot always went back to 
her (nobody ever left her, she naively said), and 
so does the fit reader enamoured of the great 
creations of art. 

As for Bette herself, she is without a rival in 
Balzac or elsewhere — the perfect culmination of 
his studies in female wickedness, the Black Pearl 
that he drew from his profound and laboured al- 
chemy of souls. There are but few characters in 
[138] 



BALZAC THE ARTIST 

fiction so vividly and terribly realized that we 
never lose the fear which the mere sight of the 
printed page where they have their life imparts; 
and of these is the incomparable Bette. But in- 
deed her quality is such that it cannot be sug- 
gested in a few lines of description. I always go 
back to the book in order to further probe her 
secret, and after many readings I have not yet 
found it. Like lagOj. she seems in her villainy 
without adequate motive, but with this difference, 
that we feel she is justified according to her ter- 
rible inner code and the workings of her dark 
nature. The chronicle of her goings and comings, 
her plots and counterplots, her sleepless pursuit of 
vengeance nourished by a savage virginity, is all of 
the very stuff of Balzac's power. Her death amid 
the sincere grief of the unsuspecting victims of her 
fury and hatred — hating and seeking to injure 
them to her latest breath — is a thing made credible 
only by the force of the genius which depicts it. 
She remains perhaps the chief enigma and the su- 
preme triumph of Balzac's art. 

Mr. Saintsbury perceives the full beauty of 
Lisbeth (which is much for an Englishman), but 
excellent critic as he is, I cannot follow him where 

[139] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

he appears to doubt whether Balzac has made the 
most of Hulofs vice, and even ventures to remark 
that he was not happy in treating this " particular 
deadly sin.'* I wonder where Mr. Saintsbury 
would direct us for more competent treatment! 
So much depends upon Hulot, the blind uncon- 
scious tragedian of the piece, that if he be a failure 
the work cannot be called great. But Mr. Saints- 
bury ranks it with the author's very greatest work! 
Something wrong here undoubtedly. 

I GRANT that Hulot is " rather disgusting " 
and a " wholly idiotic old fribble," especially 
toward the end of his bad courses ; his creator so de- 
picted him with deliberate intent. But take him for 
all in all, from the time when he was still " hand- 
some Hector," in his hearty, hbidinous middle age 
— ^to the latest glimpse of him in his ever-pru- 
rient senility, and I maintain that the Baron Hulot 
d'Ervy ranks with the most successful figures of 
the " Comedy," or if you please, of the literature of 
fiction. He is drawn with a certainty of touch 
which leaves no doubt of his reality. Where in 
literature do we find such another picture of the 
libertine sacrificing all that men hold dear and 
[140] 



BALZAC THE ARTIST 

sacred to the vile master passion that consumes 
him, body and soul? The picture of Hulot in his 
final stage of depravity, when he had sunk to cre- 
tinism and the last dregs of sensuality, indifferent 
to the death of his wife whose virtues he acknowl- 
edged and whom in his careless way he had loved 
— is as great a thing as you shall find in Balzac, 
repellent as it may be to English susceptibil- 
ities. The moral, too, is fearfully convincing; 
it makes you beheve in God, the Devil, and 
Balzac ! 

The writers who have accused Balzac of libelling 
human nature in such characters as Hulot have 
failed to make out their case. 

To George Sand, who had protested against 
certain characterizations in this book (and they 
will always be objected to, since they are beyond 
the pale of conventional treatment), the author 
thus justified his method: 

" You seek to paint man as he ought to be. I 
take him as he is. Believe me, we are both right. 
I am fond of exceptional beings. I am one my- 
self. Moreover, I need them to give relief to my 
common characters, and I never sacrifice them 
without necessity." 

[ 141 ] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

In this connection it is interesting to recall that 
Balzac's " Pere Goriot," perhaps the most power- 
ful novel of the Nineteenth century, was long at- 
tacked as immoral. His books, or many of them, 
are on the Catholic Index as taboo to the faithful, 
though he was, by profession at least, attached to 
Royalism and the Church; and though he wrote 
" Jesus Christ in Flanders." Henley, liberal critic 
and admirer of Balzac as he was, did not scruple to 
accuse the author of a leaning toward Sadism, for 
which he claimed to have found warrant in certain 
parts of the " Comedy." After this one is relieved 
to find that the noble Lamartine, who had full op- 
portunity of knowing Balzac, pronounced him a 
good man — one indeed whose conscience had a 
peculiar repulsion from evil. 

The risk incurred in attempting to deduce a 
writer's moral bias or personal character from his 
literary creations has not seldom been pointed out, 
but it will always attract a certain type of critic. 

It sometimes happens upon the disclosure of a 
crime or scandal peculiarly shocking — like a plague 
spot suddenly uncovered in the community — ^that 
people will exclaim against it as incredible, as if 
to compliment human nature or indemnify the 
[142] 



BALZAC THE ARTIST 

cause of morality in general. They do not wish 
to admit the possibility of such deeds, the existence 
of such malefactors; as judging the admission it- 
self to be a criminal offence. This seems to fairly 
represent the attitude of certain — mostly English 
— critics on the question before us. They refuse 
to allow that the human character can be as bad 
as Balzac depicts it, and even if so, it ought not to 
be described at all ! In a word, there is no validity 
in the critical objection to Balzac's treatment of 
evil in his novels (whatever religious casuistry 
might make of it) . The question, as we have seen, 
did not trouble our author. In his own phrase, 
he did not invent human nature or the evil thereof 
— he observed it and described it as a necessary 
element of his great task — the history of a com- 
plete society. We may allow that Balzac's divina- 
tory genius urged him to sound the uttermost 
depths of human wickedness — the farthest reaches 
of the lawless will. But one should be as gifted 
as the author of the " Human Comedy " himself to 
determine the question whether it sometimes led 
him astray or falsified his picture of life. 

To conclude: The world created by Balzac in 
his " Human Comedy " has places to suit tastes the 

[143] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

most diverse, and one can move on until he finds 
a scene to his liking. I know not if it be true, as 
some English critics contend, that Balzac has por- 
trayed the evil that is in human nature more con- 
vincingly than the good; at any rate, the question 
cannot be allowed to impeach his art. Frenchmen 
like Taine make no difficulty of accepting the 
*' Comedy " on this score. 

In my view, there is within the wide compass of 
this world of Balzac's creation many a haunted 
spot, many a wondrous enthralling region where 
the light of genius dwells in such heart-troubling 
power and beauty as may be found only in the 
work of a very few writers, and these the great 
masters of the literary art. 



[144] 



THREE 

THE rOETUNATE HOAX OF PAGAN WASTENEYS 

SEVERAL YEARS ago there came out in a 
well-known American magazine a little story 
entitled " The Death of the Poet," which pleased 
many with its fantastic humour and quaint ironic 
pathos, and for sundry other reasons especially 
delighted the relative few who deemed themselves 
privileged to read between the lines. It was mani- 
festly the fortunate, if somewhat perverse, conceit 
of a poet railing at a destiny which, with all its 
gifts, had failed to satisfy him. Moreover, the prose 
envelope of this delicate fantasy was wrought in 
a graceful and finished style, rarely met with in 
the current of contemporary literature; and this, 
with the novelty of the theme, procured it more 
than a cursory notice from our select reading 
public. 

The story purported to set forth a last and ex- 
traordinary scene in the life of Pagan Wasteneys, 
an Enghsh poet of aesthetic and paradoxical tend- 

[ 145 ] 



PORTKAITS AND PREFERENCES 

encies. Feeling that he has not long to live, 
though still under forty, and finding himself so 
bored with life that he can look forward to the 
end without regret, the poet, unlike Oscar Wilde, 
heroically resolves not to " die beyond his means." 
Accordingly, he lashes himself up to a fury of lit- 
erary production and thereby is enabled to satisfy 
the claims of his creditors before dying. A num- 
erous company, they are summoned to his bedside 
to receive that which, presumably, they had often 
vainly sought at his hands. All are paid off in 
new-minted gold sovereigns, beautiful as the poet's 
own rhymes which, alas, the world had not been 
always willing to accept as legal tender. A man 
of law, the poet's trusted friend, attends to the 
audit, while Mr. Wasteneys from his couch looks 
on, languidly elate. Each tradesman is given 
something over and above the amount legally due 
him — perhaps as a gentle rebuke for past impor- 
tunities. Then the awed creditors withdraw and 
the poet has a last interview with his wife and 
two young daughters, in which he bears himself 
with remarkable sangfroid — no tears being shed 
save those of fantasy. Finally, the poet orders 
that his books be brought in — a rather staggering 
[146] 



PAGAN WASTENEYS 

total of them — and laid at the foot of his bed. 
He passes his long white hands over them lovingly, 
and requests his faithful friend, the man of law, to 
read to him certain of the poems. This is done to 
the satisfaction of everybody (the reader of the 
tale included) ; after which the poet saluting his 
books (fifty- three in number) as his real children, 
calmly composes himself to die. Thus ends the 
little story. 

T APOLOGIZE to Mr. Pagan Wasteneys— 
■*• pardon! — I should say Mr. Richard Le Gal- 
lienne — for taking these crude liberties with his 
charming invention (the curious reader will find 
it, with much else of like appetizing quality, in 
the volume entitled "Dinners with the Sphinx"). 
My only excuse is that I had not fallen had he 
not proved himself so cunning a tempter. And 
while praising the art of his clever hoax, with its 
undercurrent of serious irony, I congratulate him 
at the same time that the obituary was premature. 
For had Pagan Wasteneys, alias Richard Le Gal- 
lienne, passed out along about 1905, I suspect he 
would not fill so large and commanding a niche 
in the Temple of Fame as seems now assured to 

[147] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

him. Surely it is better that a poet should live 
on to give his best to the world than that a parcel 
of miserable debts should be paid at such a costly 
sacrifice. This, I take it, is the meaning of Mr. 
Le Gallienne's apologue of the poet and his credi- 
tors. A fable, too, that was not without its justi- 
fying truth, for in spite of all the cruel and stupid 
comedy that has gathered about the subject — ^the 
horse-collar wit of generations of dullards — poets 
are rather more apt than plumbers to suffer and 
die of their debts! 

Happily for literature, the poet in this instance 
did not die, and so we have his latest gift to the 
world, " The Lonely Dancer," — a book which dis- 
closes higher powers than any previous work of 
his and ranks him with a very small group of the 
first poets of the age. Yet to those who have 
long known and loved Le Gallienne's art, this 
book will seem to mark no abrupt transition from 
cleverness to mastery, but merely a deepening of 
the note and a perfecting of the music which 
announce the full maturity of the artist. And 
they will justly point you that in his " Hafiz," 
which takes us back over a decade, Richard 
achieved a work, lacking indeed the reclame of 
[148] 



PAGAN WASTENEYS 

Fitzgerald's " Omar," but surpassing it in poetic 
craftsmanship, in tender and versatile fancy, — 
above all, in such a blending and marrying of his 
own inspiration with that of his Oriental proto- 
type, as has yielded a masterpiece of EngHsh verse, 
not merely or substantively what is called a poet's 
translation. These friendly advocates of our poet 
will cite you the great love lyric beginning, 

" The days of distance and the nights apart T 

as worthy to be added to the imperishable litany 
of passion ; and indeed it is not easy to deny them. 
The poetical talent of Mr. Le Gallienne was 
early manifested, and in truth his precocity was 
such as to raise a fear that he would not go the 
distance. Charming as his juvenilia were, there 
was that in the young poet's work which might 
well have given his literary sponsors even greater 
concern. I allude to its extreme facility, which 
in turn was conditioned at times by a superficial 
prettiness and sentimentalism. Emerson says that 
the poet must bleed, but in those young days, 
Richard shed no blood save that of the rose of 
pleasure. On this account chiefly, a severe criti- 

[149] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFEREIS^CES 

cism long denied virility to Le Gallienne's verse, 
and (according to the fixed custom of critics) in 
order to prove its case, did him a considerable 
injustice. There never was a time since he first 
appeared with his " Book-Bills of Narcissus," 
when Richard could not, if he so elected, write 
like a true poet. 

But it might not well be gainsaid even by those 
who cherished his talent, that in his curled youth, 
like Hylas on his errand to the fountain, Richard 
played and loitered too much by the way. Youth 
is a sweet thing, to be sure, but even a poet must 
not overstay his time in certain phases of juve- 
nility. I suspect, too, that Richard's light-o'-loves, 
of which he has had rather more than a fair allow- 
ance, have not served him well with the stern war- 
dens of literature, and perhaps have taken from 
him more than they gave. It is very interesting, 
but highly perilous, to both live and write your 
romances: which rightly or wrongly, has been im- 
puted to our poet. A too great preoccupation 
with mere Girl, and a certain rather effeminate 
cult of beauty, have in the past told against a full 
acceptance of Mr. Le Gallienne. 

But there is, fortunately, little trace of the faults 
[150] 



PAGAN WASTENEYS 

just alluded to in the latest book we owe to the 
fertile genius of this poet. His merits, as I have 
said, appear in a heightened valuation, compelling 
a new appraisal of the man and his work. Evi- 
dently Richard is of those hardy perennials who 
go on to more than justify the tender promise of 
their first flowering. This book gives us a wiser 
and maturer Richard — sadder, too, doubtless, but 
the more lovable for that, quaintly as he some- 
times copies the accent of Ecclesiastes. But he 
has achieved true pathos at last, and with it the 
full estate of the poet. I find his latest work 
redolent throughout of the sap and savour of the 
English poetical genius that was yesterday vocal 
in Keats and Shelley, and to-day " warbles its 
wood-notes wild " through Richard Le Gallienne. 

IT IS not to be questioned that the reading pub- 
lic in general have an aversion to poetry, 
mainly because, though the most difficult form of 
writing, it is yet the most commonly attempted by 
fools. Palliate the fact as we may, there is the tes- 
timony of the bookstalls to confirm it, and not less 
significant is the attitude of publishers, who are no- 
toriously reluctant to bring out verse, unless at the 

[151] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

author's proper expense — and mark you, Cerberus 
is not always to be so baited. That the public 
knows what it wants and that it does not want 
poetry (save in exceptional cases) is a broad sail- 
ing regulation in the publishing trade. It prob- 
ably harks back to the resolution of the famous 
English house of John Murray, in the third quar- 
ter of the last century, to publish no more poetry. 
The fact is that the English reading world had 
been long overdone with feeble and abortive imi- 
tations of Byron, Moore, Scott and a few other 
pre- Victorians, which caused a public revulsion 
that has lasted unto our day. The world would 
never turn from good poetry, but the sickness pro- 
duced by bad poetry is of a kind hard to over- 
come. 

Here, then, is one very practical reason why it 
is so difficult to be a poet nowadays: whatever be 
the value of the gift he brings, he is only too apt 
to find the gates barred against him. That a poet 
should expect to live by his verse seems to us as 
hazardous an adventure and as comic a notion as it 
was in Grub Street days. I do not think the mir- 
acle has been performed in our time, though a fat 
purse may be occasionally lifted on the shady 
[ 152 ] 



PAGAN WASTENEYS 

slopes of Parnassus. To live by poetry is in truth 
a dreadful trade, like gathering samphire on Dover 
cMff; and hence, no doubt, the many volumes of 
Mr. Le Gallienne's prose. 

For all that, mind you, poetry will continue to 
be written so long as Love and Beauty rule the 
hearts of men: and the poet with the true stuff 
in him will never fail to charm away those frown- 
ing gates with the challenge of his song. 

I need not descant upon the peculiar merits and 
qualities of Mr. Le Gallienne's work, rated as it is 
in literary estimation, but I should be unhappy if 
my readers did not enjoy to the full with me the 
poem, " To a Bird at Dawn," in Mr. Le Galli- 
enne's latest volume. To my mind, it is the highest 
and purest lyric cry that has been heard for many 
years in English poetry, and may well send us 
questing back to Keats or Shelley for a like strain 
of artistic excellence and austere beauty. This 
poem authenticates the sacer vates in Mr. Le 
Gallienne as no previous song of his has been 
able to do, and raises him to an unchallengeable 
primacy among the living English choir. 



[153] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

I WANT to say a word on the " style " of Mr. 
Le Gallienne's poetry, as distinguished from 
its content. People commonly think of style as 
applied to prose, and all poetry, perhaps with more 
or less reason, looks the same to them. But our 
poet's style is the first to be noted of his distinc- 
tions, marking his work most clearly and unmistak- 
ably as of the best English tradition. It has the 
seal of intellect and race. In a word, it is a pure 
and genuine poetic style, for the like of which you 
will search long among contemporary makers of 
verse. One effect of this exquisite distinction lies 
in the fact that you can never fancy Mr. Le Gal- 
lienne's poetry being disarticulated as prose — a 
thing which, absurdly enough, is often suggested 
in reading even the more pretentious verse of our 
time. Form and thought are indivisible in the 
work of this poet — a significant proof of his 
superiority. 

The poem referred to is a quite flawless speci- 
men of Mr. Le Gallienne's poetic style. There 
are many pieces in the same delightful volume that 
come little short of it in point of true inspiration 
and distinction of form. This article is already 
[154] 



PAGAN WASTENEYS 

exceeding bounds, but I cannot forbear quoting, 
as illustrative of the views here expressed of Mr. 
Le Gallienne's poetry, the following extract from 
that most unusual nature poem which he has called 
"Alma Venus": 

Beyond the. heaving glitter of the floe. 
The free blue water sparkles to the sky, 
Losing itself in brightness; to and fro 
Long bands of mist trail luminously by. 
And, as behind a screen, on the seas rim 
Hid softnesses of sunshine come and go. 
And shadowy coasts in sudden glory swim! — 
O land made out of distance and desire! — 
With ports of mystic pearl and crests of fire. 

Thence, somewhere in the spaces of the sea. 
Travelled this halcyon breath presaging Spring; 
Over the water even now secretly 
She maketh ready in her hands to bring 
Blossom and blade and wing; 
And soon the wave shall ripple with her feet. 
And her wild hair be blown about the skies. 
And with her bosom all the world grow sweet. 
And blue with the sea-blue of her deep eyes, 
The meadow, like another sea, shall flower, 
And all the earth be song and singing shower; 

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PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

While watching^ in some hollow of the grass 
By the sea's edge, I may behold her stand. 
With rosy feet, upon the yellow sand. 
Pause in a dream, and to the woodland pass. 

This also, from the " Country Gods "^ — ^which 
is, besides, remarkable for sounding a deep and 
virile note that has seldom, if ever, been credited 
to our poet, is nobly to the same purpose. It will 
remind the classically founded reader of more 
than one poem of Horace's, but there is no con- 
scious imitation and the chief point of resemblance 
is that it enforces, with scarcely less poetic charm, 
a kindred philosophy. True poets, you see, are 
always contemporaries; — that is an advantage of 
being immortal! 

I dwell with all things great and fair: 
The green earth and the lustral air. 
The sacred spaces of the sea. 
Day in, day out, companion me. 
Pure-faced, pure-thoughted folk are mine 
With whom to sit and laugh and dine; 
In every sunlit room is heard 
Love singing, like an April bird. 
And everywhere the moonlit eyes 
Of beauty guard our paradise; 

[ 156 ] 



PAGAN WASTENEYS 

While, at the ending of the day. 
To the kind country gods we pray. 
And dues of our fair living pay. 

Ah! then how good my life I know. 
How good it is each day to go 
Where the great voices call, and where 
The eternal rhythms flow and flow. 
In that august companionship. 
The subtle poisoned words that drip. 
With guileless guile, from friendly lip. 
The lie that flits from ear to ear 
Ye shall not speak, ye shall not hear; 
Nor shall you fear your heart to say. 
Lest he who listens shall betray. 
The man who hearkens all day long 
To the sea's cosmic-thoughted song 
Comes with purged ears to lesser speech. 
And something of the skyey reach 
Greatens the gaze that feeds on space; 
The starlight writes upon his face 
That bathes in starlight, and the morn 
Chrisoms with dew, when day is born. 
The eyes that drink the holy light 
Welling from the deep springs of night. 



[157] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

I HAVE said that Mr. Le Gallienne has at 
length achieved true pathos, which to a singer 
of his joyous and hedonistic impulse naturally 
came a little late in the day's account. There are 
not a few tokens throughout this book that our 
poet has served his novitiate of sorrow, but noth- 
ing more unaffectedly touching than the following 
simple verses without a title. 

Who was it swept against my door just now. 
With rustling robes like Autumns — was it thou? 
Ahj would it were thy gown against my door — 
Only thy gown once more. 

Sometimes the snow, sometimes the fluttering 

breath 
Of April, as toward May she wandereth. 
Make me a moment think that it is thou — 
But yet it is not thou! 

I now put this tantalizing book out of hand so 
that I may not be tempted to quote at further 
length — there is especially " Flos Aevorum," itself 
a perfect flower of art and poesy ; and " The 
Mystic Friends," wherein the voices of Wind and 
Rain and Sea are rendered in a noble diapason; 
and not a few others that challenge me to pay 
[158 1 



PAGAN WASTENEYS 

with grateful words something of the debt I owe 
them. 

For this poet is a bringer of gifts — poeta f evens 
dona — and especially he brings happiness, that sov- 
ereign gift without which all his charming were in 
vain. These poems are tremulous with a summons 
of joy that opens all hearts, and yet plangent with 
that sweet pain of sorrow " remembering happier 
things," which is equally a necessity of our 
strangely compounded clay. I can hardly think 
of a living poet who is better able to serve us 
in this dual wise than Richard Le Gallienne. 

Therefore, I conclude as I began, — and now I 
trust with the reader's pleased concurrence, — 
that Poetry has reason to be glad she was not 
bidden to the actual funeral of Mr. Pagan Waste- 
neys, or following the Horatian image, called 
upon to moisten the ashes of her friend the poet 
with an indebted tear. Be it many a year ere the 
cypress shall mingle in her garland for him whose 
just praise is now voiced by the silver trumpets 
of fame! 



[159] 



FOUR 



THE MAID AGAIN 



MARK TWAIN, who loved Joan of Arc and 
found in her wonderful career the inspira- 
tion of his most artistic book, perhaps his master- 
piece, writing to me a half-dozen years ago, said: 

" I was hoping that they (the Church) would 
not canonize her. We do not raise monuments 
to Adam: he is a monument himself." 

In point of strict fact, Joan has not been canon- 
ized: she has been beatified — which is canonically 
a different thing, though the difference will not 
seem important to those of other faiths. The 
Maid, then, is honoured with the appellation of 
Blessed, but she is not called a Saint, which would 
entitle her to receive, in her character of heavenly 
intercessor, the prayers of the faithful. 

Catholics, therefore, must not pray to her as 
they do or may to other recognized Saints. In 
France, especially since the war began that has 
[160] 



THE MAID AGAIN 

so tried the patience and courage of the people, 
they have shown a disposition to ignore this theo- 
logic distinction and to prefer Joan beyond all the 
Saints of the calendar. And truly one might not 
blame the poor people in this dark hour for think- 
ing above all of cette bonne Jeanne d'Arc who was 
of their common blood and who showed right gal- 
lantly that she knew how to help them. Hence 
in one diocese the Bishop ordered her effigy to be 
removed from the churches, as the people insisted 
upon praying to it, although the head was without 
the nimbus or circle of rays which indicates the 
plenary degree of saintship. This action of the 
holy man was roundly criticised (Joan never was 
lucky with Bishops!) and indeed, viewing all the 
circumstances, it may well have left him liable to 
the charge of lese-patriotisme, 

A clever French writer, M. Jean de Bonnefon, 
has composed a double Invocation to the Maid 
with a view, as he professes, to satisfying both 
Catholics and non-believers and rallying all parties 
under her standard. I translate the laic Prayer 
or " eloge " which appeared not long ago in the 
" Mercure de France." 

[161] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

GLORY TO Joan of Arc! daughter of the 
people, truly and proudly a heretic, betrayed 
by her King, sold by the nobles, martyred by the 
priests. 

Glory to Joan of Arc! condemned at Rouen by 
the whole Roman Church, by the Cardinal of 
Winchester and by the Bishop of Beauvais, by 
the Vicar of the Inquisition representing the Holy 
See, by the official theologians of the Faculty of 
Paris, by the priests and monks of every order. 

Glory to Joan of Arc ! whose King had her trial 
revised eighteen years after the murder at Rouen, 
not to rehabilitate the fame of her who had saved 
France, but only to prove that he, the King, had 
not employed a creature of the Devil. 

Glory to Joan of Arc ! terrible to the enemies 
of France, rebellious to the theologians of Rome, 
inspirer of the new patriotism, adversary of 
religious intolerance. 

Glory to Joan of Arc! forgotten so long as 
lasted the power of Kings whose throne she had 
saved: glorified by the French people as soon as 
they had learned liberty from the Revolution. 

Joan triumphant belongs to France; Joan the 
[162] 



THE MAID AGAIN 

martyr belongs to the Revolution and to free 
thought. 

Joan, the first and most beautiful example of 
heroic womanhood, is also the finest example of 
what human ferocity can do, in lies, in calumnies 
and in tortures. 

Joan created in the Fifteenth century two laic 
novelties: the cult of the fatherland as against the 
international cult of religion; the right to liberty 
of conscience, affirmed before her judges and 
executioners. 

Joan of Arc believed in God and despised the 
Church. Proofs : 

To the women who asked her to touch some 
objects in order to bless them, she replied: " Touch 
them yourselves; that will be just as good." 

In the time of Joan of Arc there were three 
Popes at once. Armagnac asked the Virgin War- 
rior to point out the true one. " I will tell you," 
she said, laughing, " as soon as the English give 
me time to breathe." 

Before the assembly of Poitiers Joan made fun 
of a Dominican who asked her in a terrified tone, 
" What language do your Voices speak! " 

" A better language than yours." 

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PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

" Remember," said a learned Doctor, " that you 
are before the theologians who have studied all 
books." 

" God has a book," answered Joan, " where no 
priest has ever read." 

Never spoke Joan in the name of the Pope, in 
the name of the Church. She admitted no human 
intermediary between her and heaven. 

At Rouen she said to the Bishops: "There is 
more in the books of God than in yours ! " 

" Are you willing to submit yourself to the 
Pope?" cried the inquisitor. 

" Take me before him and I will make answer 
to him," replied the proud daughter of the people. 

Conclusion: 

The Church dared not beatify Joan as a martyr, 
for she was the Martyr of the One Church! 

The first sentence of Rouen said: " Joan of Arc 
is cut off from the Church like an infected member 
and delivered to the secular arm." 

Glory to Joan of Arc! the first free believer of 
the beautiful country of France, saved from 
calumny and hate by the people. The head of 
Joan of Arc needs no gilded nimbus: her true 
altar, laic and French, is the Catholic death-fire of 
[164] 



THE MAID AGAIN 

Rouen whose fierce flame illumines the immor- 
tality of her superb forehead! 

The orthodox Prayer by the same hand, though 
not so long, is apparently as fervent and sincere, 
while it states the position of the Church without 
weakness or undue apology. (Unlike the torturing 
of Galileo which remains in some doubt, the trial 
and punishment of Joan, public, extraordinary, 
minutely attested, cannot be palliated or quibbled 
away.) I have not left myself room for this 
" eloge " in its entirety, but I give the better and 
greater part of it. This Invocation is less mili- 
tant and striking than the previous one, and nat- 
urally so; but as I have said, the writer seems to 
deal fairly as between the two altars, and it cannot 
be urged that he brings more incense to the one 
than to the other. Copying his impartiality, I 
offer the following version: 

Joan of Arc had received a mission — to deliver 
France from the yoke of the stranger. 

She was the sword and the buckler of God 
committed to the service of France. 

France can be saved by her memory as she was 
saved by her heroic deeds. 

[165] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

Without divine intervention it is impossible to 
explain how a seventeen-year-old child, an inno- 
cent daughter of the fields, knowing only the 
catechism, familiar only with the labours of a small 
farm, could become the leader of an army, drag- 
ging Victory behind her! 

Joan is the single human figure who unites at 
the same time, in a sublime ideal, the warrior and 
the saint, the heroine and the martyr, the invinci- 
ble archangel with the sword and the innocent 
virgin adorned only with her virtue. 

She offers the most illustrious example of what 
human weakness is capable when it becomes the 
docile instrument of Divine Omnipotence. She 
was always careful, at the summit of glory as in 
the depths of her dungeon, to perform with a 
scrupulous fidelity the duties of the most fervent 
piety. 

To condemn the Church for having tortured 
Joan of Arc is, with bad faith, to confound the 
errors of some men of the Church, who pass, with 
the role of the Church, which remains. It is the 
Church which has rehabilitated Joan of Arc, which 
has created her popularity. It is the Pope of 
Rome who has desired to confer upon her the 
[166] 



THE MAID AGAIN 

greatest honour within his power — that of the 
altars. 

During her trial she ceased not to appeal to the 
Pope, and she demanded to be brought before the 
Bishop of Rome in order that she might justify 
herself. 

On the death-pile, as the fire mounted, she 
begged Martin Ladvenu to hold the cross high- 
raised, so that she might see the Sign of God 
until the last second above the flames. 

The Church in beatifying Joan of Arc has torn 
aside the veils which error had cast upon a holy 
figure. 

THESE TWO invocations seem to me to rep- 
resent something more than a literary tour 
de force or a proof of French versatility: there is 
in truth a deeper lesson behind them. Joan of Arc 
remains one of the few dominant figures of history 
— in certain respects of character and conduct she 
approaches the Nazarene himself ! Her story par- 
allels His in the obscurity of her birth and early 
life, and in the supreme points of the Mission, the 
Betrayal and the Sacrifice. Also she resembles 
the Great Martyr in her eternal destiny ; like Him 

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PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

she has been as a sword flung into the world. She 
is still under trial, in spite of the tardy Beatifica- 
tion — a partial surrender of the Church whose 
ministers charged themselves with her death. 
Alone among the victims of mediaeval darkness, 
cruelty and intolerance, she has been able to com- 
pel from the distance of five centuries this meas- 
ure of justice and vindication. But it is not 
enough! — still her quarrel proceeds, — her white 
banner flutters in the van of the eternal conflict — 
and not yet has she lost her old wondrous power 
to summon the brave and the chivalrous to her 
defence. Strip every vestige of the supernatural 
from her legend* — and still she remains a marvel 
and an enigma to all time, as she is the choicest 
glory of the fair land of France which she 
redeemed at the price of her blood. In truth one 
feels in such an hour as the present that the Maid 
has come to personify France herself! — Beyond 
that Glory has nothing to give. 

* Voltaire found that it could not be degraded even by such 
powers of satire and mockery as he possessed. And his " La 
Pucelle " remains a witness to his everlasting disgrace. Anatole 
France has fared no better in his laboured attempt to belittle, if 
not actually to scandalize, the Maid. 

[168] 



FIVE 



OUE BEST-LOVED POET 



IT IS a very ancient, and surely a gracious 
belief, still held by the elect few, that poets do 
not grow old of the spirit: their bodily part may 
comply with the universal law of decay, but the 
soul of the poet shares, by some decree of the stars, 
in the eternal youth of his song. 

This is only to say that the true poet is Divine, 
god-like, participating in the immanent and im- 
perishable Essence of life. Such at least was the 
faith of the wise ancients — so much wiser than we 
as to many high things. Be sure that when 
Horace talked of turning into a bird and pre- 
dicted his immortality, there was nobody to jeer 
in Rome. 

There is in our land to-day, growing old grace- 
fully as to the body but ever younger of the spirit, 
one whom I have heretofore called our best-loved 
Poet.* I doubt if a single intelligent voice the 

*Mr. Riley died in July, 1916, 

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PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

whole country over would deny him this merited 
title and distinction. His mere name has grace to 
summon an impulse of love and gratitude to the 
lips of thousands, such as I believe no other 
American poet has ever been able to command. 
In his own home State of Indiana this feeling 
rises to a sort of idolatry — and very proper it is! 
Literature in our time has not been more sig- 
nally honoured than when James Whitcomb Riley's 
birthday was made a Holiday for the school-chil- 
dren of Indiana. No poet has ever lived or war- 
bled or wrote or sung to whom childhood owes 
so much which maturity is so glad to pay! In 
this province alone he has had no end of imitators, 
but scarcely a single worthy rival. 

No writer of our time has won to the hearts 
of the plain people with anything like the success 
of Riley. He had mastered the secret of Dickens, 
who, by the way, was a lifelong source of inspira- 
tion to him ; — he early found and always kept open 
the way to the popular heart. His fresh and ver- 
satile genius worked upon the old human themes, 
yet ever new to each generation, with unflagging 
charm, and sympathy, and inspiration. Fortu- 
nately, he did not have that surfeit of academic 
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OUR BEST-LOVED POET 

culture which kills off the poet and produces the 
pedant. Largely self-taught, like his master 
Dickens, his best literary capital to begin was his 
immense zest of life, and his touch with all com- 
mon joys and sorrows. I am glad that he did not 
bother to learn Latin, for had he done so he would 
not have written " The Old Swimmin' Hole." He 
left the plucking of rare and difficult laurels to 
others, content for himself to write the Plain- song 
of the American people, and especially of his own 
" home folks " of Indiana. In so electing he 
" builded better than he knew," or perhaps obeyed 
a profound suggestion of his Destiny. 

Life, far more than literature, was Riley's 
material; the light he gives is of the very sun 
of life, not a pale reflection caught from literary 
mirrors. These half-dozen volumes of his are 
bursting with joyous life and quaint humour and 
native wit and many an untaught felicity, — aye, 
and there are not lacking songs as high and pure, 
lyrics of as consummate an art as may be placed to 
the credit of any American poet. This is not to 
apologize for Riley's work in dialect: — ^he is an 
artist in that not less than in his more conventional 
efforts. 

[171] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

There is a kind of literary art, and a very per- 
durable kind, which must first be parochial in 
order to become universal. Its apparently artless 
form and simple content commend it at first to 
the unlearned and uncritical; it is warmed and 
cherished in the hearts of the common people ere 
it be given to or accepted by the polite literary 
world. Of this order was the poetry of Robert 
Burns, and to it belongs a great part of the work 
of James Whitcomb Riley. However, it must be 
allowed that, setting aside the question of dialect, 
Riley is a better poet in regular English than his 
famous brother of the thistle. Natural as was 
his impulse to sing, and easy as seemed his tri- 
umphs in dialect verse, the American strove all 
his life for artistry. I believe he was a greater 
and finer artist than is generally recognized, his 
popular appeal having prejudiced him in the eyes 
of the critical. 

To praise a poet for his popularity is to dis- 
praise him in the estimation of many critical- 
minded persons. But there is an important dis- 
tinction to observe. Some of Will Carleton's 
homely dialect pieces have been circulated as 
widely perhaps as similar work of Mr. Riley's. 
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OUR BEST-LOVED POET 

No competent judge of verse would, therefore, 
class these writers on the same plane. Shake- 
speare and Tupper in the same bookcase need not 
produce a confusion of their merits. Anatole 
France argues that there is no certain, fixed, 
absolute criterion of literary excellence. Doubt- 
less he is right, but the " fixed principle " which 
he regards as wanting in the judgment of con- 
temporary art, is seen to apply in the distant 
result of time. With all the legends of neglected 
genius, it is still to be shown that the world has 
ever gone long wilfully blind to really great work. 
It has a large hospitality, and often it seems to 
favour unduly the mediocre and the ephemeral, for 
these amuse it also; but from long experience, 
it has a shrewd eye for the occasional masterpiece. 
Mr. Riley need not lead us into this debatable 
land; his fame is as undisputed as his work is 
valuable and sincere. He has never pretended to 
write above the heads and hearts of the plain 
people; never aimed in his poetry to be, in a 
literary sense, — 

"^"^ too good 
For human nature's daily food/^ 

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PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

There never was anything perverse about his 
thought or his morals or his literary principles. 
It never would occur to him to go outside the 
decencies of life for a subject. His art from the 
beginning was a flower that took its richest hues 
from the life around him — the life of a simple, 
plain, virtuous, God-fearing people. So his work 
is clean, elemental, spontaneous; — withal motived 
throughout by an endearing humanity which at 
its deepest and best is, I would almost say, a new 
note in literature — the special offering of James 
Whitcomb Riley. 

Take this little poem which everybody — at least 
every woman — ^knows by heart. It is simple 
almost to artlessness, and yet it fully reveals the 
characteristic genius of our poet — ^his sympathy, 
his lyric lightness of touch, — above all, his power 
to speak to the heart. 

There! little girl; don't cry! 

They have broken your doll, I know; 
And your tea-set blue. 
And your play-house too, 
Are things of the long ago; 

But childish troubles will soon pass by. — ^ 
There! little girl; don't cry! 
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OUR BEST-LOVED POET 

There! little girl; don't cry! 

They have broken your slate, I know: 

And the glad, wild ways 

Of your school-girl days 
Are things of the long ago; 

But life and love will soon come by. — ^ 

There! little girl; dont cry! 

There! little girl; don't cry! 

They have broken your heart, I know; 

And the rainbow gleams 

Of your youthful dreams 
Are things of the long ago; 

But Heaven holds all for which you sigh — ■■ 

There! little girl; don't cry! 

I beg to say, with all deference to the court, 
that I would rather have written this tiny poem 
— this Masterpiece! — than the bulk of that correct 
but hfeless literature which is honoured by critics 
and neglected by the common sort of humanity. 
It would, I am sure, give me a longer, better title 
to remembrance. Like the child's rattle found in 
a tomb of the great Pyramid, it may carry to some 
remote age an articulate echo of our hterature. 



[175] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 



GOOD WINE needs no bush, and the 
critic is dispensed from praising Mr. 
Riley's poetry in detail: — from Mr. Howells, 
the great man of letters, to the humblest citizen 
of Boone, Indiana, there is no break in the 
chorus of assent. The tribute is one to person- 
ality as well as literary power — to our best loved 
Poet! Mr. Riley's poems are, literally, household 
words throughout the land, and to him more than 
to any other living poet is granted the right to 
speak to our most sacred affections. Finally, he 
fulfills the test of a great reputation backed by 
equal performance. 

He is a poet of original impulse and inspira- 
tion ; you cannot " derive " him from any set of 
literary forbears. Indeed, although he is a con- 
summate artist, it would be hard to prove a 
literary motive against him. He is, in short, one 
of those fortunate artists who make literature 
unconsciously and, so to say, without thinking 
about it. The curse of the self-conscious pen, the 
smirk of the literary egotist from which very 
few American writers have been free (Stevenson 
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OUR BEST-LOVED POET 

thought the best of us wrote like amateurs) is 
totally absent from his work. 

He has been content with the simple, sufficing 
themes of life and he has never sought the ab- 
normal, the repulsive, the unclean. There are no 
" sugared sonnets " of his dedicate to covert or 
esoteric vice. He brings us no fleurs de mal; his 
inspiration is not of the brothel, the clinic or the 
charnel-house. This is not to say that he has 
been afraid of life — few poets indeed have had so 
keen an eye for its dramatic contrasts, the mingled 
arabesque of good and evil, the astounding al- 
ternations in the smallest scene of human reality 
open to the artist's eye. But his art, like the 
sun's ray, is purifying, and the divine pity of a 
true poet transfigures his most painful subjects. 

His songs of boyhood and youth, with their 
simple joys, their perfect faith and no less perfect 
illusion, are his best; indeed I think no poet that 
might be named has made this province so entirely 
his own or left such enduring trophies there. Has 
there ever been vouchsafed through the art of the 
poet such a vision of happy boyhood as Mr. Riley 
has given us in "Out to Old Aunt Mary's"? 
Where is the man who could read it through with- 

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PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

out tears? The poem is too long to quote here in 
full, and it should not be cited piecemeal; but I 
plead against myself for these few verses that will 
surely make you want to do your heart a service 
by looking it up and re-reading it in the cherished 
volume. 

Wasn't it pleasant^ O brother mine. 

In those old days of the lost sunshine 

Of youth — when the Saturday's chores were 

through. 
And the ''Sunday's wood'' in the kitchen, too. 
And we went visiting, ''me and you," 
Out to Old Aunt Mary's? — 

"Me and you" — And the morning fair. 
With the dewdrops twinkling everywhere; 
The scent of the cherry -hlossqms blown 
After us, in the roadway lone. 
Our capering shadows onward thrown — 
Out to Old Aunt Mary's! 

Why, I see her now in the open door 

Where the little gourds grew up the sides and o'er 

The clapboard roof! — And her face — ah, me! 

Wasn't it good for a boy to see — 

And wasn't it good for a boy to be 

Out to Old Aunt Mary's? — 
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OUR BEST-LOVED POET 

The jelly — the jam and the marmalade. 
And the cherry and quince '' -preserves " she made! 
And the sweet-sour pickles of peach and pear. 
With cinnamon in "em, and all things rare! — 
And the more we ate was the more to spare. 
Out to Old Aunt Mary's! 

The honey, too, in its amber comb 
One only finds in an old farm-home; 
And the coffee, fragrant and sweet, and ho! 
So hot that we gloried to drink it so. 
With spangles of tears in our eyes, you know — • 
Out to Old Aunt Mary's. 

And the old spring-house, in the cool green gloom 
Of the willow trees, — and the cooler room 
Where the swinging shelves and the crocks were 

kept. 
Where the cream in a golden languor slept. 
While the waters gurgled and laughed and wept — 
Out to Old Aunt Mary's. 

Is it not but just that he who has restored the 
heart of youth to so many should be dispensed 
by the kind gods from growing old of the spirit 
himself? . . , 



[179] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

ALTHOUGH a poet of joyous impulse, 
Mr. Riley's ear is sensitive to the slightest 
tremblings of the minor chord. No poet has 
made songs more beautiful to express the pathos 
of remembered youth and happiness — the dumb 
regret for and hopeless striving to regain that 
Paradisal hour of life, even in retrospect, which 
occupy so many sad hearts. Mr. Riley touches 
this chord with infinite tenderness and with a 
power to soothe and console which proves him 
priest as well as poet. And we see very plainly 
that to be a good man is a necessary condition 
to being a great poet. The Baudelaires and the 
Verlaines have something to say for themselves, 
it is true, but it is not given them to make such 
verse as this: 

We must get home — for we have been away 
So long, it seems forever and a day! 
And O so very homesick we have grown. 
The laughter of the world is like a moan 
In our tired hearing, and its songs as vain, — 
We must get home — we must get home again! 

We must get home! There only may we find 
The little playmates that we left behind, — 
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OUR BEST-LOVED POET 

Some racing down the road; some by the brooks- 
Some droning at their desks, with wistful look 
Across the fields and orchards — farther still 
Where laughs and weeps the old wheel at the mill. 

We must get home; and, unremembering there 
All gain of all ambition otherwhere. 
Rest — from the feverish victory, and the crown 
Of conquest whose waste glory weighs us down. — 
■ Fame's fairest gifts we toss back with disdain — 
We must get home — we must get home again! 

The difficulty of writing such verse without 
lapsing into false sentiment is proven by the 
utter failure of Mr. Riley's imitators (no poet 
has ever had more) to produce anything like a 
passable copy of this phase of his art. There 
have been many — alas, too many attempts; but 
no mimic has ever succeeded in getting a foot 
within the sanctuary! 



I HAVE pointed out, in a discussion of the 
_ so-called " free poets," that we are in some 
danger of being carried away from the primary 
function of poetry. It seems the poets don't 
want to sing any more; they want to do some- 

[181] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

thing else, and there is a great wrangle and 
controversy going on as to the nature and value 
of this substitute form of entertainment. 

Mr. Riley has never been troubled by any 
doubts as to the leading function and business of 
the poet: — he knows that it is to sing, and it is 
as a singer pure and simple that he has won his 
dearest laurels. His music is varied, ingenious, 
sometimes a shade fantastic; but he never sings 
merely for the tune; always the poetic thought 
has precedence. Sometimes his passion for pure 
music and melody — as instinctive as that of the 
thrush or the bobolink — tempts him to a feat of 
rhymed extravagance, a bit of roulade, or if you 
please, a display of poetic fireworks; for which 
I at least would not greatly quarrel with him. 
There are moods when the mere beauty of a 
poet's rhythmic words steals the soul with delight, 
and the intellect also yields itself a willing captive 
to the spell. No poet has a more sovereign 
charm for the dolce far niente moods than Mr. 
Riley: — such famous and famihar charming as 
this, for example: 

Beyond the purple, hazy trees 
Of summer's utmost boundaries; 
[182] 



OUR BEST-LOVED POET 

Beyond the sands — beyond the seas-** 
Beyond the range of eyes like these. 
And only in the reach of the 
Enraptured gaze of memory. 
There lies a land, long lost to me, — 
The land of Used-to-be! 

A land where music ever girds 

The air with belts of singing -birds. 

And sows all sounds with such sweet words. 

That even in the low of herds 
A meaning lives so sweet to me. 
Lost laughter ripples limpidly 
From lips brimmed over with the glee 
Of rare old Used-to-be. 

Lost laughter, and the whistled tunes 
Of boyhood's mouth of crescent runes. 
That rounded, through long afternoons; 
To serenading plenilunes — 
When starlight fell so mistily 
That, peering up from bended knee, 
I dreamed 'twas bridal drapery 
Snowed over Used-to-be! 

This is mere " instrumentation," if you please, 
the artist running his octaves in the sheer bravery 
of his skill (with one eye on the admiring audi- 

[183] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

ence!) — but who can deny the charm and delight 
of it? . . . 



TURN WE again to his graver moods, and 
above all, to his mastery of simple pathos. 
Mr. Riley's power as a magician enables him to 
use the plainest words, the most obvious rhymes, 
in the highest service of beauty. His poems are 
taken from the heart of life and reflect a power 
of observation, an eye for dramatic values, a 
grasp of human nature that mark him off from 
the run of lyrical poets. His work is intensely 
vital, personal, realized: one is always held, chal- 
lenged, fascinated by the story behind it. 
One feels too that the poet has lived all of these 
pieces; that they could not otherwise have been 
created. 

Mr. Riley as a born poet and a true craftsman 
loves rhymes (and we love him for it), yet he 
rarely, if ever, falls into Poe's vice of laboured 
assonance and perverse rhyming. Yes, there's 
" Leonainie," but that we know was done " on 
purpose," a tour de force, and a wonderful take- 
off it is of the Poesque manner. By the way, 
his " Songs after Master- Singers " are dehghtful 
[184] 



OUR BEST-LOVED POET 

essays in this sort of writing: they are better 
poetry in themselves and far more striking 
" imitations " — reproductions rather — than Eu- 
gene Field's exercises in kind. 

Brilliant, various, versatile, prolific as he is, 
Mr. Riley has never lost sight of the integrity of 
his art; never permitted himself to be seduced 
and carried away by the lure of mere cleverness. 
All this says much for the restraint of the artist, 
seeing that he has been far-and-away the most 
popular American poet of our time and the most 
solicited of publishers. 

I am aware that certain critics deplore the lack 
of " intellectual content " in much of Mr. Riley's 
poetry, and they find fault with the simple itera- 
tions and alliterations which bid so cunningly 
for the ear. But who can deny its appeal to 
the heart, or its power to evoke the earhest, 
happiest emotions of hfe? And it is justified in 
the only fashion that poetry need be justified — 
it has been taken into the hearts of the people. 
The high-brows may cavil as they please, and 
the new school of " free poets " utterly protest 
the music and the unfading garland. But the 
fact remains that to be so accepted of the people 

[185] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

is the grandest and proudest distinction that even 
a great poet may aspire to. 

Mr. Riley was born to be the adored laureate 
of a close-knit, homogeneous people: — this we 
see by the attitude of his native Indiana. Our 
ever-changing citizenship forbids such a distinc- 
tion in the largest sense; but it may at least be 
said that in our day this crowning honour has 
not fallen to any American poet in such measure 
and with such depth of love and admiration as 
have been accorded to James Whitcomb Riley. 



[186] 



SIX 



ALMA LUPA 



THE LATE Elbert Hubbard used to gibe and 
poke fun at the colleges and the classics with 
a careless freedom that argued no responsibility 
toward either. Perhaps, from the utilitarian point 
of view, he had a certain right to do so, and his 
own case furnished him strong, if not entirely con- 
vincing, arguments — for the man of positive talent 
breaks all rules. 

There was much force in his contention against 
wasting time on dead languages, but of course one 
must be sure that the languages so described are 
really defunct. Latin and Greek certainly are not, 
as a schoolboy may satisfy himself by glancing 
into any good English dictionary. Elbert's argu- 
ment, though clever and spirited, was far from 
being a new one — the advantages and disadvan- 
tages of classical training have been accurately 
assessed these many years. It is quite true that 
such culture would be wasted on ^^e majority of 

[187] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

young Americans, who simply have no use for it. 
Not that Elbert had so frittered away any part 
of his youth: his Alma Mater having been (as he 
liked to say) the University of Hard Knocks. 
But the dispute has other phases than that which 
challenged the keenly practical, yet sufficiently 
idealistic, mind of Elbert Hubbard. For one 
thing he quite overlooked our debt to the Renais- 
sance: indeed like other able men, largely self- 
taught, he did not realize how much he owed to 
Latin and Greek. 

Again, I will grant that Colonel IngersoU's defi- 
nition of a college as a place where " pebbles are 
polished and diamonds are dimmed," holds a par- 
tial truth. (Like Hubbard, he was unduly preju- 
diced by his dislike for the ministerial profession — 
a rub of the classics wouldn't have hurt the literary 
style of either man.) Furthermore, I am glad to 
see a good deal of the " superstition " of the 
classics done away with, and I think it no bad 
thing that the world is fast losing its reverence 
for the " donkey loaded with Latin." Many a 
fool has got by to honour and preferment on no 
better grounds. 

And yet, while conceding so much, I must still 
[188] 



ALMA LUPA 

hold that for the scholar, artist or literary man, 
the good old classics, even in very moderate infu- 
sion, have a value beyond price. They stamp his 
soul with the precise image of Liberty, the most 
precious bequest from the ancient world. They 
impress his mind with the Law of Beauty. They 
instil into him reverence for what is noble — ^hatred 
and contempt for what is mean and base. They 
teach him restraint and economy of expression — 
qualities rarely seen in a writer without classic 
foundation. (I would rather that Bernard Shaw 
had learned Latin than music — it would have saved 
us some terrible loquacity.) In short, they teach 
him his own language — no man lacking the Latin 
discipline can be said to know English compe- 
tently, that is, with the knowledge requisite to a 
literary artist. (Again I waive the exceptions 
which genius is always privileged to make.) What 
is so much of modern literature but a palimpsest 
over- writing (and be sure at the same time, under- 
writing) of the thoughts of the classic past? 
Wanting the clue to this ever fertile tradition, the 
writer has missed something vital, yet intangible 
and indefinable, which no amount of talent or skill 
or energy can supply. 

[189] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

And this something is the quintessence of style 
and thought, the heirloom of classic culture passed 
on to us by hundreds of generations. 

What is it accosts you at once in the pages of 
Robert Louis Stevenson, say the " Familiar 
Studies " or the " Travels with a Donkey"? The 
eccpression — for the story is always a matter of 
secondary importance. Sickness did not permit 
this writer to live the life of adventure that he 
longed for in order to vitalize his creations: yet 
he never fails to lure us with the grand adventure 
of his style. It would be hard to find a less thrill- 
ing tale than " An Inland Voyage," as regards 
hair-raising experiences of the Count Fathom 
order, and it would be still harder to match among 
the great travellers and adventurers the beauty 
of such a page as this: 

"When Villon journeyed (perhaps by the same 
pleasant valley) to his exile at Rousillon, I won- 
der if he had not something of the same appear- 
ance. Something of the same preoccupation he 
had beyond a doubt, for he too must have tinkered 
verses as he walked with more success than his 
successor. And if he had anything like the same 
inspiring weather, the same nights of uproar, men 
[190] 



ALMA LUPA 

in armour rolling and resounding down the stairs 
of heaven, the rain hissing on the village streets, 
the wild bull's-eye of the storm flashing all night 
long into the bare innerchamber — ^the same sweet 
return of day, the same unfathomable blue of 
noon, the same high-coloured halcyon eves, and 
above all, if he had anything like as good a com- 
rade, anything like as keen a relish for what he 
saw, and what he ate, and the rivers he bathed 
in, and the rubbish that he wrote, I would ex- 
change estates to-day with the poor exile, and 
coimt myself a gainer. ..." 



In pure literature the French have a great 
superiority over the English. Why? Because 
they derive so much from the classic tradition, 
their language, the finest literary instrument in 
the world, being founded almost entirely upon 
Latin. And the Latin blood counts, too, of course. 
How poor would modern literature be without 
Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, Musset, St. Beuve, Guizot, 
Lamartine, Taine, Renan, Flaubert, Daudet, 
Maupassant, Anatole France! Matthew Arnold 
indeed was of the opinion that as Latin has come 
in a large sense to represent Greek, so in course of 
time French will come to stand for Latin. But 

[191] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

the spirit of culture will take care that in such 
an evolution nothing shall be lost. . . . 

A little of the She- Wolf's milk, then, if you 
please! No true man of letters ever regretted his 
nurture at that rugged but kindly breast: his head 
and heart were surely the better for it. And it 
is still a potent, perhaps indispensable, element 
in the making of literature that endures. 



[192] 



SEVEN 

A NOTE ON LAFCADIO HEAEN 

IS THERE any sort of reproach or bar sinister 
in the fact of a Hterary man having Irish 
blood in his veins, in his belonging much or little 
to the most deeply spiritualized poetic race in the 
vrorld? That vision of the invisible world which 
is the delight and the despair of poets, to whom 
has it been given in fuller measure than to the 
Celt? Those preoccupations of the soul which 
token an immortal destiny, those strivings to re- 
gain an eternal inheritance which mark a people 
of the spirit, what race do they indicate with a 
clearer stigma? Is not the entire history of the 
Celt a rejection of the things of this world for 
the Shadow and the Dream? . . . 

Yet one might think there was some reproach, 
or inferiority, or even degradation implied in the 
Irish name, judging from occasional hints dropped 
by illiberal, or superficial, or perhaps merely 
careless persons. For instance, Mr. F. Hadland 

[193] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

Davis, an Englishman, writing about Lafcadio 
Hearn in an American periodical, and writing ex- 
ceedingly well in the main, has this to say on the 
subject of his racial inheritance as accounting for 
some of the characteristics of his literary genius: 

"Can we in any way account for Hearn's deli- 
cate, sensuous and ghostly style? I can suggest 
two possible, but by no means exhaustive, reasons 
— viz., his birth and the fact that he suffered from 
myopia. This method of procedure rather savours 
of chemical analysis, only in this particular case we 
know the salt is called genius, and we work back, 
on quite unscientiiSc lines, to try and find some 
of the factors in producing it. Hearn's parentage 
was interesting. He had Greek and Romany 
blood in his veins. The Greek accounted for his 
unquenchable love of the beautiful in everything 
he saw, combined with an almost equal love of the 
horrible; and the Romany for the fact that he 
was one of the world's wanderers." 

The suggestion of Hearn's myopia as a forma- 
tive influence in his style, an idea that originated 
with the eccentric Dr. Gould, I have treated else- 
where. But is it not singular that a writer so 
well informed as Mr. Davis — he claims to have 
[194] 



A NOTE ON LAFCADIO HEARN 

read all Hearn's books and nearly everything pub- 
lished about him! — should ignore the fact, obvious 
and indisputable, of Hearn's Irish blood? The 
attempt on the part of Miss Bisland, his first 
biographer, to trace his Irish forbears on the pater- 
nal side back to 1693, when they were Dorsetshire 
English, seems a rather foolish piece of pedigree 
making. It certainly was unjustified by the facts. 
There were mingled elements in Hearn's blood, 
but he was more Irish than anything else. Those 
who knew the living man never doubted it, and to 
my mind at least, his genius yields the strongest 
proofs of Celtic derivation. 

This is not the first time Hearn's racial ante- 
cedents have been made to bear an invidious note. 
Mr. Davis seems to share an ugly, and I had be- 
lieved, extinct prejudice with Miss Bisland, which 
prejudice is the more to be regretted, since her 
work in most other respects is deserving of liberal 
praise; while her slightly romantic friendship with 
Hearn gives her a claim of esteem upon all who 
are interested in the writer and the man. Her 
motives were, bien entendu, of the worthiest, to 
throw something of a picturesque glow about a 
life that in its earlier years sorely needed it — 

[ 195 ] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

that held in truth overmuch darkness and suffer- 
ing. But in writing as she did, about Hearn*s 
early family and religious associations, with her 
intense womanly sympathies touched to the quick 
and her feelings more exercised than her judg- 
ment, I suspect Miss Bisland did not render the 
best possible service to his memory. 

Hearn himself was partly to blame for the un- 
disguised prejudice evinced by his biographer. He 
had suffered much in his shy myopic youth; he 
had been ill-understood and harshly treated, and 
in some confused way he had lost home and 
friends. All this was not clear to Hearn himself, 
or at least he gave no clear account of it. I be- 
lieve also that Hearn romanced about the sordid 
circumstances of his youth, and that simply from 
the quality of his imagination. There is little in 
what he tells to put a sure finger on; rather, most 
of it seems of a nightmare unreality. Hearn 
began early to brood over and fashion that ap- 
propriate legend of himself with which every artist 
is more or less preoccupied. He indulged this 
usually harmless passion to an extreme degree, 
until he had at one time hallucinated himself into 
the notion that he was the object of a systematic, 
[ 196 ] 



A NOTE ON LAFCADIO HEARN 

malignant persecution by priests of the religion in 
which he had been brought up. But close readers 
of his work, including his letters (like Mr. Davis, 
I may claim to be one) know that in his later 
years he softened considerably and opened his 
mind to saner views. I believe even that he 
learned to laugh at his pet Bugaboo of Jesuitic 
persecution. 

Finally, with his partial disillusionment regard- 
ing Japan, notable in his last years, the pendulum 
is seen swinging back for Hearn, and the imme- 
morial claims of race and blood are felt to be 
striving within him for reassertion. 

In spite of home and wife and children, in spite 
of Japanese name and all, nay, in spite of the 
literary glory that Japan had yielded him, I 
believe he was never less attached to the strange 
land of his adoption than in the last year of his 
life. Something of the change must be referred, 
of course, to the loss of his place in the Imperial 
University, and his personal experience of the 
darker traits of Japanese character, traits which 
are indeed common to East and West. But I 
believe a deeper explanation is called for, if we 
would truly estimate this final phase of Hearn's 

[ 197] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

thought. A man can not add a cubit to his 
stature by thinking, nor can he remake himself 
as to his racial and spiritual inheritance. Lafcadio 
Hearn remained Celtic in soul, spite of his many 
years in Japan, spite of his immersion in the 
myths and creeds of a strange people, spite even 
of what he believed to be a sincere preference of 
OBuddha to Christ. Oh, yes, the pendulum was 
swinging back for Lafcadio Hearn! Man is unto 
himself a mystery: by ways strange and un- 
dreamed of, across the opposing currents of a 
lifetime, the soul of a race wins back to its 
own. ... 



[198] 



EIGHT 



THE KISS 



I RISE to a point of order. There is altogether 
too much kissing in the magazines and Sunday 
newspaper supplements; also in the asbestos fav- 
ourites of the Circulating Library. Two arts are 
hereby joined in the indictment, for the literary 
offence is no less culpable than the pictorial crime. 
A kiss in one of the Hearst magazines, for ex- 
ample, is almost equal to a statutory misdemean- 
our, and it makes the guileless reader particeps 
criminis. The artist always aims at the maximum 
of expression and effect, for the popular maga- 
zine is expected literally to kiss itself into public 
favour. Each month its gay-tinted cover bears the 
likeness of some pretty courtesan with rosy beak 
pouted for the kiss. There is no mistaking the 
Hearst girls among the many Cyprians of the 
magazine trade : — they have a way about them that 
is distinctly their own and that only the connois- 
seurs of love fully appreciate. 

[ 199 ] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

A sort of orgy of osculation rages throughout 
the world of current fiction and magazinedom, and 
the kiss is being passed around as an exceedingly 
good thing. A popular novelist like Mr. Cham- 
bers is generally rated by his kiss — I mean his 
manner of describing and realizing for the reader 
that species of caress between two persons of op- 
posite sex. Upon this he (or she) lavishes all the 
resources of his word-painting and all his power of 
suggestion. Likewise the popular artist is es- 
teemed for his skill in depicting the kiss, in sur- 
rounding it with all those yum-yum attributes 
which are better felt than described; at the sanie 
time avoiding any license too gross which might 
give puritanism the alarm. It is a subtle and deli- 
cate art, and no wonder that those who excel at 
it command astonishing emoluments. Women are 
very partial to it, as the kiss is the symbol of their 
power and charm; and the popular magazine is, 
above all things, concerned with milady's approval. 
So even the discreet Mr. Bok makes much of the 
kiss, both in text and illustration; but it is of the 
special " Ladies' Home Journal " brand, if you 
please, sterilized and, as it were, too good to be 
true ; not in the least like the frank aphrodisiac of 
[200] 



THE KISS 

the monthly " Hearsts." Mr. Bok's kissing girls 
never make you feel that you have seen 
them under the "white lights," or that they are 
out to sell anything — except the " Ladies' Home 
Journal." 

The word kiss, you will observe, is of the class 
of vocables called onomatopoeic — words that mimic 
the sound of the thing signified; and in a sense, 
onomatopoeic must be the art that renders it. 
^ Magazine fiction offers us all sorts and varieties 
of kisses, — passionate, burning, lingering, languor- 
ous, Lesbian (the kind that makes you thrill all 
along the keel and gives the uttermost sensation 
of goneness) ; kisses soulful, ecstatic, exalted, 
kisses pleading and importunate, kisses that mad- 
den and intoxicate, kisses that do everything but 
deny. There are kisses that lead to nothing worse 
than matrimony and a eugenic family, and there 
be kisses that conduct to paresis and the padded 
cell. Have a care then in making your choice, for 
many's the man whose undoing is determined by 
a kiss. For indeed the kiss is the woman, and the 
woman is your fate! 

Persons of curious competency in this province 
tell us that the kiss between lovers yields a minor 

[201] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

satisfaction of desire: it is a pledge, a promise, an 
I O U of the inexorable Eros, a prelude to pos- 
session: — the kissed mouth will have the rest, says 
Balzac. 

Maupassant observes that the kiss is only a pref- 
ace to the Book of Love, but a charming preface, 
more delicious than the volume itself; a preface 
that one can re-read constantly with ever unsated 
pleasure, while one is not always able to re-read 
— ^the book! 

The same instructed artist describes the kiss as 
the most perfect, the most divine sensation given to 
human beings, — ^the last, the supreme limit of hap- 
piness. It is in the kiss, in the kiss alone, that 
we believe we can sometimes feel that impossible 
union of souls of which we dream — perhaps only 
the hallucination of fainting hearts. The kiss 
alone gives this profound, immaterial sensation of 
two beings that are as one. All the violent delir- 
ium of complete possession is not worth that trem- 
bling approach of the lips, that first touch moist 
and sweet, and then that kiss silent, motionless, 
rapturous, and long, so long! to both. 

Byron's description is better known to English 
readers : — 
[ 202 ] 



THE KISS 

A long J long Mss, a hiss of youth and love 

And heauty, all concentrating like rays 

Into one focus kindled from above; 

Such kisses as belong to early days. 

When heart and soul and sense in concert move. 

When the mind's lava and the pulse a blaze. 

Certain rigid moralists hold that the woman 
who gives her lips to a man without lawful war- 
rant abandons herself as effectively as if she gave 
all. . . . 

This is perhaps going too far, but undoubtedly 
the kiss is a rare good thing, and we are pass- 
ing it aroimd joyously — at least in the maga- 
zines. . . . 

The kiss is woman's supreme weapon, her most 
potent and subtle means of seduction; not Cassar, 
not Attila, nor Napoleon might prevail against it. 
For verily the kiss has conquered nations, torn 
up treaties, laid kingdoms desolate, founded or 
destroyed religions, suppressed dynasties and 
changed the order of royal states. 

It is also, as we have seen, important to the 
prosperity of magazines, the fame of authors and 
the reputation of artists. 

Oddly enough, the kiss, as we practise it in the 

[203] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

West, is a stumbling block and an offence to some 
Eastern peoples, who are thereby moved to look 
askance at our morality. One hates to admit the 
fact, but those remote pagans, Buddhists or what 
not, unblessed with the " Ladies' Home Journal " 
or the Hearst magazines (those disseminators of 
culture, sweetness and light) seem to have a 
more correct moral feeling than ourselves in this 
regard. 

" Let the reader reflect for a moment," says 
Lafcadio Hearn,* " how large a place the subject 
of kisses and caresses and embraces occupies in our 
poetry and in our prose fiction; and then let him 
consider the fact that in Japanese literature these 
have no existence whatever. Such actions, except 
in the case of infants, are held to be highly im- 
modest." Elsewhere he points out that the Jap- 
anese regard the kiss as peculiarly sexual in its 
nature, and that they refrain from it, except in the 
most private circumstances, as from an indecency. 
Even at social functions of a free character where 
geisha are in attendance and sake is drunk without 
restraint, a Japanese guest is never known to kiss 
or embrace these girls, dedicate to pleasure as they 

* See chapter on the " Eternal Feminine " in " Out of the East." 
[ 204 ] 



THE KISS 

are: this infraction of good form is reserved to 
foreigners. . . . 

But " East is East and West is West and "— 
I refuse to go farther with Mr. Kipling. In our 
half of the world sex is deemed the salt of litera- 
ture as of hfe, in spite of a conventional hypocrisy 
which would pretend to " wave " it, in Podsnap- 
pian fashion, out of existence. 

So it is that, by a shrewd compromise with our 
inherited puritanism, we have perfumed and 
prettified sex in the persons of Gibson girls and 
" Bambi " heroines, and are enabled to pass around 
the kiss as a good thing. 

Vive le haiser! 



[205] 



NINE 

THE " FREE " POETS 

OH, WHAT is the matter with the young 
" free " poets? Why are they so pale, as if 
they drank cumin, or were exhausted hy love? 
They boast of their freedom, yet are they not 
happy. Oh, what's the matter with the young 
poets, and especially, why don't they write some 
poetry? Sacred Apollo! can this be the matter 
with the young poets? 

Again I ask, what's the matter with the young 
poets? It is proper that they should be in revolt 
against something — nay, anything; but by the holy 
Nine, not against poetry itself! Why do they 
write so much prose — they with their loudly pro- 
fessed hatred of journalism and their contempt for 
the perishable word? Why don't they use up their 
hot young blood in making love and poetry? Did 
not Musset show them how when he poetically 
mounted on his funeral pyre with Dejanire? 
Have they never heard of Catullus, Villon, Kon- 
[206] 



THE " FREE " POETS 

sard, Shelley, and Keats? Let them write their 
golden poems now and postpone their smart pros- 
ing to middle age — it will be on them unawares! 
Hearken, ye rebellious but impotent young 
poets, to one that was also young in his day and 
especially a Poet !— Hark ye to Catullus, and note 
how fresh that silver voice throbbing with love and 
youth and desire rings out from the tomb of 
centuries. 

VivamuSj mea Leshiaj atque amemus! 

Soles occidere et redire possunt: 
Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis luce, 
Nox est perpetua una dormienda. 

There is no translating the solemn music of the 
Latin, but I venture to English the lines rudely, 
that no reader may have a quarrel with me. 

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let u^ love. 
The suns set, yet do they ever return; 
For us, when once our brief light flickers out. 
Comes the night endless of perpetual sleep. 

Da mi basia mille — " Give me a thousand 
kisses ! " he cries, and so his hfe flutters out in 
a flame of passion at thirty-three. But those lines 

[207] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

to Lesbia, with their melody more magical than 
that of Memnon's statue, " which at sunrise 
played," will outlast the Pyramids. Nay, not the 
less will endure his exquisite lament for his lady's 
sparrow, which — 

Nee sese. a gremio illius movehat, 

Sed circumsiliens modo hue modo illuc. 

Ad solam dominam usque pipilabat. 

(Nor wandered far from her bosom, but hopping 
about now here, now there, still kept piping to his 
one dear mistress.) 

Ah, that little sparrow-pet of the darling Lesbia, 
still chirping — pipilans — though Rome itself has 
been swept away since the song began! 

List ye now to the prattling waters of Horace's 
perennial fountain — and tell me that poetry as 
good can be made without music. No, no! the 
gods still possess their secret. 

O fons Bandusiae splendidior vitro 

Fies nohilium tu quoque fontium. 
Me dicente cavis impositam ilicem 

Saoois, unde, loquaces 

Lymphae desiliunt tuae. 
[208] 



THE " FREE " POETS 

Do you hear the immortal prattling of that 
fountain of living water, and can you in your con- 
ceit imagine any other formula of art and poesy 
that would have brought its music down to 
us? . . . 

I scarce dare offer this poor paraphrase of my 
own to the unclassically tuned reader. 

O fountain of Bandusia^ 

Than crystal een more clear, 

• •*••• 

Thou shalt he deemed most noble. 

Since I have sung thee here. 
And the oak thy dear companion 

From hollow rocks upspringing. 
Whence thy waters downward leap 

With a prattling and a singing. 

Or lend an ear while charmingly he coaxes 
Phyllis to make one at un petit souper a deuoo at 
the Sabine Farm, for which he tells her there has 
been provided a cask of nine-year Alban: — plenty 
to drink, i' faith! " Come now, last of my loves," 
he entreats (I know not how candidly) — "for 
after this I shall never glow for another 
woman." — 

[209] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

Age. jam, meorum 
Finis amorum 

(Non enim posthac alia caleho 
Femina)y condisce modos, amanda 
Voce quos reddas: minuentur atraa 

Carmine curae.. 

Learn with me the sweet measures (he pleads) 
which you shall then intone in your most lovely 
voice. Black cares shall flee away before our 
song. . . . 

And a late brother of these two children of the 
She-Wolf, the scarcely less divine Musset, how 
sings he this immortal pain and rapture of the 
poet? . . . 

Poete, prends ton luthj le vin de la jeunesse 
Fermente cette nuit dans les veines de Dieu, 
Mon sein est inquiet; la volupte Voppresse, 
Et les vents alteres m'ont mis la levre en feu. 

Which I may paraphrase: 

Poet, seize thy lute — to-night the holy wine 

Of youth ferments in the veins of God: 
My breast is ill at ease., desire a burden grows. 
And the. parching winds heat me as a sod. 

Or this verse which Hugo flings to you with the 
grand gesture whose secret he possessed: — 
[210] 



THE " FREE " POETS 

Quel dieUj quel moissonneur de Veternel ete 

Avait, en s'en allant, negligement jete 

Cette faucille d'or dans le champ des etoiles. 

What god, what harvester of the eternal year 
Departing, left his golden sickle here 
Flung careless in the wide and starry field. 

Truly I suspect the old recipe is still the best — 
just to be young, and to love, and to make poetry 
that is music. The " free " poets are, of course, 
free to do otherwise, and good luck to them! — 
but who would not rather take a chance in the 
fellowship of Horace, Catullus and Musset? 

I LIKE your talent, Ezra Pound,* but I should 
prefer your genius — if you would give me of it. 
This clever letter to me, these sparkling critiques, 
those delightful tilts with London's stodgy literati, 
I relish them all to admiration; but you that are 
young and a poet should be at other work. What 
prose will hold the years at bay like " Adonais " 
or the " Lamia " ? . . . 

I say as much to you, Richard Aldington: * the 

* The most talented and productive, and not the least militant of 
the " free " poets or imagistes. Mr. Pound is an American and 
not especially proud of the fact; he lives abroad and his literary 
inspiration is wholly exotic. Mr. Aldington is an Englishman. 

[211] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

cleverer your critical writing the better would be 
your poetry — if you would only write it! You are 
paying in copper whilst the Muses offer you gold. 
Reserve your economy for the autumn years. In 
other words, do your poetry now and your jour- 
nalizing later. He that speaks to you is no Osier, 
yet indifferent honest : youth and poetry are plants 
on a single stem! 

Does anybody care a straw about Shelley's 
opinions on poetry or poetics? Could any man of 
taste endure to read through the controversy be- 
tween Byron and one Bowles? Go to, then! 
Furthermore, your war upon the ruling canon and 
aesthetic of poetry (though I like well enough the 
bravery of it) is merely a futile and barren thing. 
Here is a plain answer to all your malapert mani- 
festoes : 

The way to discountenance bad poetry is 
to write good poetry. 

Manibus date lilia plenis! . . . Give lilies with 
full hands. 

Have you done this or are you doing it, oh, 
scornful young poets ? I would like to pay you the 
compliment, but really I have not seen much of 
[ 212 ] 



THE " FREE " POETS 

your work, and of this scarcely anything which I 
would call poetry. Oh, but this is maddening! 
— can we call a man a poet who does not write 
poetry? Yet until you do this you but spit in the 
teeth of the wind. . . . 

Again, whilst there is much to praise in your 
effort to free English verse of the cliche and the 
conventional, there is also something to blame, 
since you go too far. Stock phrases, expletives, 
silly personifications, shop-worn tropes, affecta- 
tions of every sort, can be cleared away without 
injury to the basic form and principle of English 
poetry. But melody and metre cannot be dis- 
pensed with, for they are of the very soul of 
poetry. 

A prime reason for loving verse is that it is 
rememherablej and it could not be so without 
metre or measure. But I agree that prosody 
should be a help, not a hindrance: I would give 
the Muses wings, not shackles. 

The thing that we recognize as beautiful and 
that we can put away in our memory as an endur- 
ing possession, that is the special, transcendent gift 
of poetry. The poet who cannot give us this 
. . . well, there are the quarries! 

[213] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

I have read many alleged poems by the new 
school of "free poets" (as they are self -called), 
but only a few that were tolerable, and hardly a 
single one that I could have stored in my memory 
as an enduring possession. 

There is always something suspicious when peo- 
ple want to play without observing the rules of 
the game. 

In this case the something wrong seems to be 
a lack of positive talent or, I would even say, 
vocation. The " free " poets, so far as I know 
them, want to be free to write poetry without 
proving either their right or their ability to do so. 
(Exceptions made in favour of Messrs. Pound, 
Aldington and one or two others.) 

I have examined hundreds of their little silhou- 
ettes or word patterns, and my conclusion is that 
the best of these seem child's play compared to the 
work of filling a Spenserian stanza with the true 
content of poetry. Such a stanza as this, for 
example : 

The sky is changed! — and such a change! O nighty 
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous 
strong, 

[214] 



THE " FREE " POETS 

Yet lovely in your strength as in the light 
Of a dark eye in woman. Far along. 

From peak to peak, the rattling crags among. 
Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone 
cloud. 

But emry mountain now hath found a tongue: 
And Jura answers through her misty shroud. 
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud! 

Now I remember hundreds of such verses with 
perfect ease and surety (taken on in youth, I 
may confess), while I cannot re-word a single 
one of the silhouettes put forth as " poems " by 
the Down- with- Shakespeare School. In fact, I 
could as easily memorize the stipple of a 
stenographic report. 

The success of one extraordinary rebel and 
poacher is responsible for this revolt of the " free '* 
poets. It is a great misfortune to poetry that the 
peculiar vogue of Walt Whitman should have in- 
spired so many untalented persons to go and do 
likewise. He had, I freely grant, compensating 
merits which none of his imitators may claim, 
though some of them more than equal him in point 
of productiveness. It is true that old Walt 
jimiped the fence and raided the preserve of poesy 

[215] 



PORTRAITS AND PREFERENCES 

by unlawful methods. But what was mere poach- 
ing in his case, justified to some extent by an 
uncommon talent, is rank vandalism on the part 
of the many graceless, ignorant and faking pre- 
tenders who take his name in vain. 

Note, however, that the vogue of Whitman is 
mainly with professed literary experts or the sex- 
ually emancipated — it has never reached the mass 
of the people. And it never will, because of its 
almost complete lack of what goes as melody and 
metre. I do not remember to have ever heard an 
ordinary person quote a line of Whitman's, though 
— and here's a paradox for you — I have known 
not a few persons of quite ordinary talent try to 
write hke him! 

One of the oldest superstitions of the race — old 
even before Literature was so much as thought 
of — was that the poet should sing. Will the free 
poets remember this? They will find it an inval- 
uable, nay, unerring test of vocation. And if they 
will accept it, ah me! how much trouble and 
vexation of spirit will it save them. 



[216] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 
ONE 

BERMUDA 

CONCERNING THE winter climate of Ber- 
muda, it is quite impossible to get exact data 
— in this respect Bermuda is like a lady whose age 
cannot be questioned. The tourist books " leave 
much to be desired " in the way of precise infor- 
mation, yet it is difficult to accuse them of perjury 
or prevarication. The hotel people, Cook's agents, 
shopkeepers and natives generally are entered into 
a cast-iron conspiracy on this point. The same is 
carried to a sacrificial extreme. While I shivered 
in my overcoat, with the mercury at 49° or 50° 
(it was in mid- January), and ruefully watched a 
cold rain falling. Mine Host Paschal of the Amer- 
ican House paraded before me in a thin sack coat, 
somewhat ostentatiously enjoying himself. Mr. 
Paschal was a diver in his earlier career and is a 
man of very rugged constitution. . . . 

[2191 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

No doubt one feels the cold more in Bermuda 
from not expecting it, and also because the hotels 
generally are built of a porous kind of stone, which 
is bound to convey discomfort. The coral insect 
who made this stone, and who was indeed the orig- 
inal colonist of Bermuda, took no thought for cer- 
tain climatic contingencies. Certainly there were 
a few days when I was glad to go to bed in the 
afternoon just to keep warm. Explanation was 
made that we were having phenomenal weather, 
and I freely admit that it was paradisial compared 
to conditions then existing at New York, to say 
nothing of Montreal, Duluth, or Calgary. Never- 
theless, I could not warm myself with a litho- 
graphed copy of " Beautiful Bermuda," and I 
should have preferred a little more of the " semi- 
tropical climate '* so lovingly dwelt upon in that 
admirable work. 

Let me add that during my sojourn of a fort- 
night there were some days when Bermuda ac- 
tually lived up to her literary reputation and came 
tardy off in no single respect. Ah! then she was 
indeed lovely, this daughter of the sun, and her 
strange fascination invaded my every sense, so that 
I dreamed passively of remaining ever captive to 
[220] 



BERMUDA 

her strong toil of grace. Pas vrai, Bermuda? 
Well, then; I kiss your hands and say au revoir! 
— remembering only your smiles and forgetting 
your frowns and tears. . . . 

THE BEAUTY of the sea colouring in and 
about Bermuda is hardly to be exaggerated. 
It would seem as if that great artist the Sun had 
proposed to himself certain experiments in this 
tiny paradise before trying them in the world at 
large. I shall never forget my first view of the 
harbour of Bermuda, at early morning, under a 
light warm shower, with a miraculous rainbow 
trembling overhead almost within reach. Nor my 
first glimpse of Harrington Sound, that wondrous 
jewel of sea- water enclosed within the island's 
green embrace: — it called to mind, in its image 
of plenary and satisfying beauty, Shakespeare's 
figure of " one entire and perfect chrysolite." 
Certainly here is loveliness that " the sense aches 
at," of which the heart cannot have too much, and 
whereof the eyes weary not by seeing. I returned 
time and again, but the beauty was ever the same, 
or rather infinitely varied. 

At my time of life, having discounted some few 

[221] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

illusions, I feel that I could content myself in a 
white stone villa on Harrington Sound, with a 
sea of lapislazuli spread out at my feet. Espe- 
cially in my present mood, as I am writing in face 
of a grim snow-drifted Connecticut landscape that 
quite corrects my notion of Bermudian inclemency. 
Property in Bermuda is quite reasonable yet, I 
am informed by a friend, who built himself just 
such a place in that very spot a few years ago. 
Now is the time to act before the American inva- 
sion fully sets in and a boom is developed. This 
calamity is imminent, but the Bermudians aver 
with true British pluck, that they will sell out only 
at the highest price. I think they dislike us, but 
our money is not strictly objectionable. Really, 
I am strongly tempted — after all, it is only forty- 
eight hours from Broadway. Ariel is there — and 
Richard Butler Glaenzer. By George — St. 
George, of course — I'll do it! Pending the 
necessary arrangements I cry with old Horace — 

Ille terrarum mihi praeter omnes 
Angulus ridet! 

I had been strolling about the Public Garden 
at St. George, which is the oldest settlement in 
[222] 



BERMUDA 

Bermuda (1609). The Garden is overgrown 
with weird tropical trees and plants, some of which 
to a Northern eye, seem endued with a furtive, 
conscious, malignant life (there was especially a 
cactus, armed with razor-like leaves which I am 
sure nobody could get past at night without leav- 
ing behind a few sections of his person) . In this 
garden there is also a huge monument to Sir 
George Somers, Knight, who has been dead a long 
time, his heart being here buried. Sir George was, 
in effect, the original discoverer of Bermuda. 

Leaving the garden, at length, where green and 
variously armed and tentacled monstrosities seemed 
plotting to detain me by force, I stepped into a 
quaint, narrow old street; still musing over Sir 
George Somers, Knight, and his buried heart. 
Suddenly I was arrested by a chirping sound, 
famihar enough to folk who dwell in great cities, 
especially in those quarters where pleasure of a 
certain sort is more or less frankly pursued. Look- 
ing about, I saw a shapely " yellow gal " go traips- 
ing across and down the lane with two redcoats 
piping her off. The look on that girl's face, part 
fear and shame, part coquetry and anger, was not 
one to be lightly forgotten. It rises before me 

[223] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

as a silent reminder that I have something to say 
about Mr. Tommy Atkins. 

NATURALLY!" you interject, since the 
red-coat gives a touch of colour to the 
island, while the drills, parades, regimental band 
concerts, etc., furnish diversion to the tourists. 
Don't we know that the American lady visitors 
most unpatriotically dote on Tommy plain or in 
epaulets? Are not romances so furnished from 
time to time, some of them involving no end of 
money? How many Tommys do you suppose have 
been bought out of the service by American women 
during the past ten years? Enough to make you 
stare. American women are all snobs (the Ber- 
mudians will tell you), have a perfect passion for 
marrying foreigners, since that gets them notoriety 
in the papers; and some of them are not hard to 
suit — in their view, a soldier is the next good thing 
to a title. The uniform shows off a good figure, 
and when, pray, has the heart of woman proved 
obdurate to martial airs and graces ? Also it must 
be allowed that there are American ladies to whose 
delicate ears the cockney burr seems the native 
accent of aristocracy. Oh, not really of the Four 
[224] 



BERMUDA 

Hundred, of course; just comfortable middle-class 
persons from Brooklyn, or Boston, or Philadel- 
phia. The expectation of such is the fond hope 
of Mr. Atkins, though it is at best only a lottery 
chance. . . . 

But I am thinking rather of those weak ones of 
an inferior, childlike race who have had to bear the 
burden of Tommy in divers shameful ways during 
his age-long tenancy of these islands. The copious 
tourist literature offers nothing under this head. 
You may ask the omniscient Mr. Bell, who will 
look you in the eye and talk about the weather. 
The young woman at the Public Library is equally 
non-committal. The American ladies who cry out 
ecstatically that Tommy Atkins looks too dear 
in his scarlet dress uniform, evince no curiosity on 
the point, and would indeed consider the topic an 
improper one. But you can piece out the story 
for yourself by observing many faces among the 
coloured natives of Bermuda. Very good-looking 
they are as a rule and often with features of a dis- 
tinctively English cast. Manners, too, decidedly 
better than those of our own emancipated coloured 
brethren. . . . Then, when you go to the 
Church of England service at the Cathedral on 

[225] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

Sunday, where the pomp of bedizened officers and 
red-coated soldiery, helmeted and superb, enforces 
the grandeur of the ritual — ^you may reflect, if 
you please, upon this item of the cost of British 
"civilization." . . . 

WE WERE walking along one of those won- 
derful roads, clean and smooth and ac- 
tually sawn out of the living rock — roads whose 
material was mainly supplied by the coral insect 
and the labour of making them by the blacks dur- 
ing more than two hundred years of slavery (freed 
in 1834, they have had the care and labour of the 
roads until this day). These Toads rank high 
among the attractions of the island; they collect 
no mud, being of porous coral limestone, whicli 
quickly absorbs the rain, and they require little 
cleaning for the same reason. Nature in Bermuda 
is a great labour-saver. (The authorities aver that 
no snow ever falls on the island, but I have seen 
a very passable imitation of hail.) 

It was an almost perfect day, such as comes not 
infrequently in the winter season to restore hope 
to the shivering citizen of Duluth or Calgary, and 
to save many Bermudians from the fate of Ana- 
[ 226 ] 



BERMUDA 

nias. We were ascending a low hill on our way 
to the sea caves, which are about two and one-half 
miles from Hamilton. A young woman of our 
party stopped to admire some bougainvilleas in 
a wayside garden. Nothing lovelier than the pur- 
ple flowers of this tropical plant could be imag- 
ined — it makes you realize why this colour was 
chosen by the Romans as a symbol of power and 
aristocracy. We were sharing the young woman's 
raptures when an old gentleman accosted us from 
the roadside and offered to show us some finer 
specimens of the flower. 

He was over eighty, tall, with an eagle beak and 
an eye still keen; but his head and hand shook 
a little from palsy. He led us up the road a piece 
and into his own garden on the crest of the hill. 
It was carefully kept, but seemed old like himself: 
the white house, too, had an aged appearance; 
though it was very clean and in excellent repair. 
There was an air of secular quiet about the place, 
and the great palms themselves seemed to show 
the slow effects of time. Presently we were admir- 
ing the old man's bougainvilleas, which fully justi- 
fied his pride, and he was telling us that he had 
lived here sixty years. 

[ 227 ] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

" Yes," he continued, replying to a surprised 
exclamation; "and my wife with me — she died 
only three months ago." 

As he said these words, the old man's voice 
broke a little, and we murmured our sympathy, 
while striving to picture to ourselves this incredible 
idyl. Sixty years of constant love and compan- 
ionship had been his and hers, the old man told us, 
under this mild sky where the rigours of the North 
are unknown, in this quaint tropical garden whose 
brooding trees seemed to guard the secret of long 
life. Long before any of our party were born he 
had brought his young bride here, and for the 
space of two lives they had lived here together. 
Happily, no doubt, as human nature will permit, 
and sometimes learning that deeper love which 
comes only by sorrow and bitterness. We thought 
of the sadness of that separation, when this old 
Adam lost his immemorial Eve ; of what must have 
been his terrible loneliness and longing — and then 
a pretty little girl holding a doll tightly hugged 
under one arm, ran up to us and took her grand- 
father's hand. He stooped to caress her, and as 
he did so, we were conscious of the Spirit of Youth 
like a living presence in that ancient garden. It 
[228] 



BERMUDA 

was a relief to us all; and there were tears in the 
young woman's eyes when at parting he pressed 
upon her a splendid cluster of bougainvilleas. 

SMALL AS Bermuda is, one sees exemplified 
there to advantage the British system of com- 
bining extreme liberty with adequate suppression 
of crime and disorder. Everybody seems to drink, 
especially the native Bermudian, white or black, 
who absorbs like the coral rock, though not pref- 
erably at his own expense. Even the police are 
not chary about drinking at the public bars, if 
invited, and they are a distinct source of legitimate 
entertainment to the free-spending tourists. But 
all this marches with a better all-round observance 
and enforcement of law than we have in ISTew 
York, where a policeman would be " broken " for 
drinking at a public bar. I will not deny that in 
this respect, at least, the English seem to me the 
better administrators of liberty. 

It need hardly be added that the presence of the 
soldiers — usually a regiment of one thousand men, 
besides a war-ship with its quota of marines — 
furnishes a strong deterrent to crime. Nor is 
Tommy Atkins shy at wetting his whistle, and in 

[229] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

this regard, his superiors nobly uphold the honour 
of England. But this liberality is apparently con- 
sistent with perfect discipline and good order. At 
the time of my visit (1914) the record showed 
but one homicide in forty years, and this among 
the blacks. 



[230] 



TWO 



BERMUDA II 



BERMUDA IS worthy to be celebrated by 
poets, but her honours in this respect are not 
oppressive. Larry Chittenden, the cowboy singer, 
has cast his poetic lariat there to some graceful 
effect, and my gifted friend Richard Butler 
Glaenzer pauses occasionally in his pursuit of 
the Great American Novel to throw off a sonnet. 
Also Mrs. Burnett has a fine villa, one of the 
island show-places, which persuasively recalls her 
agreeable inventions. However, Tom Moore, the 
Irish poet, who visited Bermuda over a hundred 
years ago, still remains her chief boast in the way 
of literary association. As Moore is a favourite 
of my own, I permit myself a few remarks in this 
connection. 

Moore was a young man, in his early twenties, 
when, in 1803, he saw Bermuda for the first time 
— a little later he visited the island to qualify for 
a sinecure office connected with the Admiralty, 

[231] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

and sojourned there a few months. Moore got 
this job through the influence of Lord Moira (the 
revolutionary Lord Rawdon) . What with his ex- 
quisite singing voice and social talents, he had al- 
ready made himself a favourite in English aristo- 
cratic circles — a position he was never to lose but 
rather to deepen and extend with his increasing 
fame. Pictures of the poet taken at this time 
show an unmistakably Irish face, brilhant eyes 
(suggesting a certain likeness to Brinsley Sheri- 
dan) and a fine head of curling hair, which later 
earned for him the sobriquet of " Bacchus." 

Moore's Bermudian poems are therefore juve- 
nilia, not to be classed with his maturer work like 
the " Irish Melodies," still unrivalled in their blend- 
ing of poetry and music. They are poetic epistles, 
elegant, elaborated and somewhat too cunning in 
their learned notes and allusions, which " Thomas 
Little " addressed to his titled and aristocratic 
friends, no doubt with a view to helping his modest 
fortunes. Nevertheless, Moore's " Odes to Nea " 
and other American pieces are not unworthy of 
his genius, though but a first draught of the vin- 
tage which had yet to win its full charm and mel- 
lowness of bouquet. Their passion is rather liter- 
[232] 



BERMUDA II 

ary than real (Tommy was never much of a 
Lothario, his " amours " being mostly imagined 
for the exercise of his art). Nea stood for a 
creation of this sort, as in later life the poet hinted, 
rather than the " lady of the isle " with whom the 
chronicles seek to identify her. Once indeed the 
poet confesses that wandering together on the wild 
and lonely shore, he and his Nea very nearly 
" faute" as the French put it; but even here we 
are not seriously alarmed for the lady's virtue. 
" Nea's House " is shown, by the way, and with 
very questionable taste, her descendants are traced 
down to the present, none of them exhibiting any 
marked resemblance to Moore. So legend arises 
at the popular demand. 

Moore's century-old descriptions of Bermuda, 
whether in prose or verse, are singularly fresh and 
true, reflecting the reality like a mirror. Nothing 
finer can be imagined, it seems to me, than the 
following which faithfully describes my own im- 
pressions on entering the harbour of Bermuda: — 

Bright rose the morning, every wave was still. 
When the first perfume of a cedar hill 
Sweetly awaked us, and with smiling charms. 
The fairy harbour woo'd us to its arms. 

[233] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

Gently we stole before the whispering wind 
Through plantain shades that round like awnings 

twined 
And kissed on either side the wanton sails. 
Breathing our welcome to these vernal vales; , 
While, far reflected o'er the wave serene. 
Each wooded island shed so soft a green 
That the enamour' d keel, with whispering play. 
Through liquid herbage seemed to steal its way. 
Never did weary bark more gladly glide. 
Or rest its anchor in a lovelier tide. 
Along the margin, many a shining dome. 
White as the palace of a Lapland gnome. 
Brightened the wave; — in every myrtle grove, 
Secluded, bashful, like a shrine of love. 
Some elfin mansion sparkled through the shade, 
Etc., etc. 

Such lines as these help us to understand why 
Bermuda is exceeding proud of the admiration she 
inspired in the little dapper gentleman with the 
musical voice and the tip-tilted nose who paid his 
respects to her so long ago. As I have said, 
Tommy had not reached his high notes at the 
time ; but even so, you will not hear such warblings 
among our pert magazine choir. I might also in- 
stance " The Snow Spirit," which is indeed the 
[234] 



BERMUDA II 

loveliest of Moore's poetical tributes to Bermuda. 
Tom Moore's House is the name given to an 
old mansion or villa situated on one of the love- 
liest points of Harrington Sound, and the tradition 
which affirms his residence there as a guest is 
fairly authentic. An old spinet is shown which 
one would like to believe he played on (modestly 
ogling the ladies therewhile) ; a room is exhibited 
as his, and near by the house there stands a cala- 
bash tree identified as the calabash referred to in 
one of his poems (to guard the tourist from error, 
some verses are thoughtfully placarded on the 
tree) . I was glad to accept the whole legend out 
of love for the poet of my race who has given so 
much pure joy to the -world. Sacred indeed are 
the vestiges of genius! I felt my heart uplifted, 
standing as I was amid a scene which could have 
changed but little since he lingered there and 
imparted to all this beauty the charm of undying 
song. 

BERMUDA PRODUCES nothing that at all 
approaches in economic value the opalescent 
colours of Harrington Sound, or the varied 
splendour of her sunsets. The island can scarcely 

[235] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

feed itself, so small is its arable area, and therefore 
the American tourist, while offering himself a 
change of scene in going to Bermuda, does not 
make a revolutionary change of diet. How the 
coral insect knew, when it built this island ages 
ago, that New York would be able to send food 
there, is as profound a mystery as may be. It is 
true there is the Bermuda onion, an important 
article of export — (not so important as formerly, 
however, the Texas onion now making great 
inroads upon the market) . By the way, this escu- 
lent seems to be so rare in Bermuda that at my 
hotel it figured among the desserts, and then only 
on grand occasions. 

Farming is mostly in the hands of the Portu- 
guese who have supplanted the blacks of late 
years, the latter here as everywhere having no 
taste for steady hard labour and preferring the 
lighter gregarious employments of the town. The 
Portuguese are amazingly industrious and saving. 

Tropical fruits such as bananas, mangoes, etc., 
are grown rather for show than use, it would seem, 
the climate not being hot enough to give them their 
full maturity ; I fancy the same is true of oranges 
and lemons. So there are a few drawbacks to a 
[236] 



BERMUDA II 

" semi-tropical " climate, though the same are not 
set down in the tourists' ritual. 

But indeed, Bermuda is not to be eaten — she is 
to be just tasted, kissed if you will, looked at a 
very great deal, and temperately enjoyed. This 
sounds a bit figurative, but I have no better coun- 
sel for the tourist. . . . 

Another thing the coral founder could hardly 
have anticipated a million years ago: New York 
sends money to Bermuda as well as food, gobs of 
it, by the tourists who pour in from December to 
May. (There is very little tourist business in 
Summer, though Bermudians vouch for a climate 
that should make Paradise envious.) Of course, 
New Yorkers are welcome for their money — Ber- 

IT 

'muda has the peculiar hard British reverence for 
lucre — but they are Hkewise a little feared. This 
applies especially to Americans who have acquired 
estates and winter residences there — no large num- 
ber. They are blamed for demoralizing the labour 
market by paying fancy wages to their servants. 
English colonists of caste resent this, and in con- 
sequence thereof, are planning to make acquisition 
harder for the too-free American spender. His 
lavishness in the matter of tips alone has scattered 

[ 237 ] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

seeds of discontent among the coloured folk, who 
now think and talk about money ( I have it on the 
best Bermudian avouchment) as never before in 
the annals of the island. This is embarrassing to 
the person of ordinary means, for every New 
Yorker is at first sight taken for a millionaire, and 
the truth being presently discovered, he is made 
to feel the tacit but eloquent depreciation of the 
Jungle (coloured hotel people, etc.). Positive in- 
conveniences also arise from the same cause. It 
must be said in all candour that after a short so- 
journ, the parasitic atmosphere of Bermuda be- 
comes oppressive. Spenders of the exaggerated 
Broadway type are not improving the native mor- 
als and manners of the island. I was told that 
a cub of a rich and famous New York family vis- 
iting there last season, amused himself by giving 
five-dollar tips for the most trivial services. This is 
the most hateful vice of the American " bounder," 
and next to this the depreciatory attitude which 
he adopts toward his own country with the first 
British Bermudian who sits down with him to 
whisky-and-soda. It is really curious how 
quickly our " bounder " takes the British atmos- 
phere of the island. In this he is warmly emulated 
[238] 



BERMUDA II 

by his women folks. Listening to them (which 
you cannot easily help doing) you would marvel 
how the American Constitution lasts overnight! 

AUTOMOBILES ARE neither used nor 
' permitted to be used in Bermuda. Many 
wealthy Americans have sought to override this 
veto, only to find themselves up against a stone 
wall. Common sense approves of this ordinance. 
The islands are smaller in area than we are apt 
to think, about twenty-five square miles; the roads 
are rather narrow, as a rule, with many sharp 
curves and turns, so that careful driving is at all 
times necessary. Then — and this is perhaps the 
strongest argument against the auto — the hotels 
make a feature of carriage drives to the various 
sights of the place, and thereby many of the col- 
oured people get their livelihood. 

These black drivers are generally polite and 
good-natured. George, a favourite of mine, had 
markedly English features and possessed a fund 
of information, always ready if not invariably ac- 
curate, as to all things Bermudian. His fluent 
speech, eliding consonants wherever possible, was 
a delight to the ear. In his accent there was a 

[239] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

trace of cockneyism, and very curiously, he sounded 
his "v's" hke Sam Weller; thus, "werry" for 
very, " wallable " for valuable, etc. It is many 
years, I understand, since this peculiarity dropped I 
out of the speech of Londoners. A significant 
reminder of the long occupation of Tommy 
Atkins. . . . 

George's simplicity was charming : he had never 
been off the island and he was proud of the fact. 
Had he had any chances to go to New York? 
Oh yes-sa, 'deed yes, plenty times, but Bermuda 
alius seemed good enough for him. He noticed \ 
that some of those coloured boys that went to New 
Yohk (George was about forty) came back afteh j 
a yeah or so and nevah 'peared the same-like. 
They spent their money for cough medicine en' 
seemed to drap away-like, en' then one day you 
heahd of a fuhnal. No — sa, I ha-nt any fault to 
find with Behmuda. In cou'se the wages are wery 
small, oh, yes — sa, wery small, en' if it wa'n't foh 
the kindness of the tourists " — Here George deli- 
cately flicked the off horse's ear and permitted me 
to reflect that his simplicity was not wholly free 
from art. 

But simple these Bermuda blacks are, as one 
[ 240 ] 



BERMUDA II 

does not find them in the States. Thus, I was 
talking to George about the freedom from crime 
which is one of the regulation boasts of Bermuda, 
only one man, and he a black, having been hanged 
there in forty years (this was quite recently and 
the police sergeant who arrested him is regarded 
as a hero) . " Well, no — sa," said George, " it's 
true they ain't much bad doin's heah, neither 
among the black folk nor the white folk. En' it 
stands to reason why not — ^you jest can't help 
yousself. You'se jest got to behave, for how'se 
you goin' to get away? S'pose you rob somebody 
or beat some one up right here in Hamilton and 
then run to Paget, or Tucker's Town, or St. 
George. What do they do? " concluded George, 
liis voice rising with the triumph of the disclo- 
sure, — " why they jest telephone ovah dere en' git 
you!" 

Nothing more naive ever came out of the 
Jungle: — I regret that my imperfect translitera- 
tion of George's dialect fails to do it justice. ... 



[241] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

A HALF-DOZEN Boer prisoners-of-war still 
remain in Bermuda, having refused to take 
the oath of allegiance to English authority. They 
have been on the island twelve years, expiating 
their stubborn and hopeless fidelity to their lost 
country, and they are the objects of much curi- 
osity to visiting tourists. As prisoners-of-war, I 
daresay the government supports them, or at least 
makes them some provision; but they seem to live 
by their trade in souvenirs, cedar canes and cas- 
kets, calabash bowls, etc., which they turn out with 
remarkable skill. 

I liked to talk with one of them especially, a 
short, powerful man about fifty, said to have been 
an officer under Paul Kruger's government. He 
had the grey piercing eye of the marksman, re- 
minding me of that fatal accuracy of aim on the 
part of those war-like farmers, which cost the 
British Empire so much blood and treasure. It 
flashed suddenly upon me one day when I had 
referred to his "fellow-soldiers." "Soldiers!" 
he ejaculated, pausing over his lathe, " we were 
not soldiers, but freemen. Sixty thousand of us, 
young and old — nothing you could call an army." 
[242] 



BERMUDA II 

A patrol of redcoats passed the open door of 
the Boer's Httle workshop as he spoke. I looked 
at the short, grey-eyed man and he divined my 
thought. 

" But we were a match for over two hundred 
thousand of those British," he added, as if he had 
not paused in his speech. 

"And listen!" he said, coming nearer with 
uphf ted hand and burning eyes ; " the Bible 
it says there will be a war, and then a peace 
which will be no real peace, and then again a 
war! We shall be twice sixty thousand the next 
time." 

My heart swelled at the courage of this uncon- 
querable rebel, and for the first time I realized how 
dear liberty must be to men of his simple, primitive 
type, austere and God-fearing. He had served in 
all the bloody conflicts of the Transvaal, from the 
Kaffir War to Jameson's Raid, and lastly in that 
great struggle which had almost brought the giant 
power of England to its knees. Majuba — Mod- 
der River — Spion Kop — what visions rushed upon 
me ! Looking at him, this plain homely hero, my 
eyes misted and he seemed to grow taller before 
me, while his face assumed an air of grandeur 

[243] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

and something of solemn beauty. " It is the Spirit 
of Liberty itself honouring this soldier of a lost 
cause," I thought, stricken with awe; and I felt 
that my feet pressed holy ground. . . . 

" I prefer a lemon stick," I said to the Boer, as 
I was about to choose a souvenir; "the cedar is 
too brittle." 

" Try this one, then, with the cedar handle," he 
said, offering me a sturdy cudgel of lemon wood, 
the tough lemon tree of Bermuda. " You can 
strike with it." 

" I take this stick," I said meaningly to the 
Boer, " not because I have any need of it — but 
because you struck!"* 

"Would God that I might strike again!" he 
replied, grasping my hand in farewell. 

I shall never see him again, for he and the other 
recalcitrants will soon be sent back to Africa. Re- 
calling what they have endured for their stubborn 
fealty, who will say that patriotism is not still the 
Greatest Thing in the world? . . . 

There is an alleged remark of Mark Twain's 
(surreptitiously postcarded without Mr. Bell's ap- 
proval) that the trip to Bermuda is like going 
[244] 



BERMUDA II 

through hell to get to Paradise. My own expe- 
rience was just the opposite — I got my hell re- 
turning! But going or coming you are bound to 
get yours — 'tis a toll due to Father Neptune from 
which only hardened sea-dogs are exempt. How 
a man survives such a cataclysmal tearing up of 
his " inwards," and surviving, how he ever comes 
to forget it or pass an hour without prayerfully 
remembering it, — these are mysteries beyond the 
unaided power of human reason to solve. Per- 
haps it is vanity that makes us wish to hide even 
from our inmost selves the picture of that awful 
" goneness " and humihation. I got mine, at any 
rate, and I fondly believed that there was no sec- 
ond to it on the ship. But a large man, somewhat 
superfluously repeating my sentiments in an ad- 
joining stateroom, completely undeceived me on 
this point. Listening to him, I felt quite ashamed 
of my own performance, and decided that I was 
but a raw amateur. I even told him as much, but 
he did not receive my observation in a friendly 
spirit — that is, I so judged, for his words were un- 
intelligible. Well, well, under the circumstances, 
a little petulance seemed excusable. . . . 

Do you ask me, shall I ever make another trip 

[245] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

to Ariel's enchanted isle? I reply, what man 
worthy of the name would be content with one 
kiss of a beautiful woman? . . . Not I, of a 
truth, Bermuda! 



[246] 



THREE 



THE CONQUEROE 



FROM THE very outbreak of the Great War, 
beginning with the hurricane dash of the 
Germans upon Liege, there was the usual public 
expectation of some great general or military hero 
to be cast up by the tide of events and to dominate 
the situation. 

The public eternally wants a hero and the busi- 
ness of war is to furnish him, is it not? Well, 
then: the public will not be satisfied with boards 
of strategy, army councils, or even kings and 
emperors in the background. It demands him — 
LUi — in a word, the Man on Horseback! 

But the Great War proceeded, battles were lost 
and won, cities besieged and taken, fortresses 
blown up, whole regions laid desolate and un- 
counted thousands of men slaughtered: and yet 
the Hero, the Expected One, failed to appear. 
Through the smoke of battle, through the bloody 

[247] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

mist of carnage, from lands near-by and from 
remote countries all eyes watched for Him in- 
tently, all hearts trembled with the wish to hail 
and salute the conqueror! 

Still he came not, though there were several false 
alarms which exasperated a public that deemed 
itself cheated in this monstrous war without a hero. 
Generals, generals, generals — princes and high- 
nesses and excellencies — a world on horseback but 
not THE MAN : what sort of a humbug farce of war 
was this for which the world would have to pay 
so dear a price! 

Responding to the popular desire, the news- 
papers sought to pick out and distinguish a hero ; 
for it was to their profit to whip up the interest 
of the public, which flagged at times over the dull 
and censored chronicles of the war. For there 
passed many days without a battle or striking 
incident of any sort, and even the invention of 
journalists, unhampered by knowledge of what 
was actually taking place, often failed of its pur- 
pose. Thus for a moment General Joifre shone in 
the journalistic calcium; then the spotlight shifted 
in turn to Von Kluck, Von Hindenburg, French, 
Pau, and others. None would do after the briefest 
[248] 



THE CONQUEROR 

exposure, and then the bold attempt was made to 
play up the Kaiser as the man. But his imperial 
modesty took the alarm and his name disappeared 
from the official bulletins. The Crown Prince 
was tried with a little more success; however, he 
gave an interview and talked himself out of the 
hero class. Then the newspapers sought to lead 
out a statesman who would answer the public 
desire, failing a real military hero. Churchill was 
thrown on the screen, but he was so egregiously 
under measure that this attempt may be said to 
have failed even more decisively than the previous 
efforts. 

The public fumed with exasperation and the 
newspapers were at their wits' end : they had tried 
their whole bag of tricks, including the most costly 
and brilliant American fakes, and yet here was the 
indisputable fact : the public was being flatly bored 
with the Greatest War of modern times — a war 
which, practically for the first time, had furnished 
the spectacle of men fighting in the air. But the 
public grumbled that it was more of a spectacle 
than anything else, and a great deal of vulgar wit 
was expended on the " Zeppelin pleasure tours." 
Clearly, something would have to be done, and 

[249] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

quickly too, if journalism were to maintain its 
profits and its prestige. 

Still the monotonous campaign went on, East 
and West. The official reports of the several 
powers engaged took on a deadly sameness, even 
to contradicting each other's claimed victories. 
There were battles, sieges, marches, counter- 
marches, assaults, repulses from day to day. The 
military censors were learning the art of news- 
paper composition: it seemed that they would 
develop a first-class journalist before they would 
turn up a great general. But meantime, alas, 
the public was being bored to death. And 
still nobody appeared in the wrinkled front of war 
to give even a momentary thrill of the hero — the 
Awaited One. Not a single man to draw upon 
himself the world's long pent up acclaim as the 
Napoleon — the Ney — the Murat — the Suwarrow 
— the Bliicher — even the Boulanger of the hour I 

In default of a real hero, the popular mind 
sought to amuse itself and at the same time give 
vent to its ill humour by playing with metaphor. 
Thus it said when the winter was well advanced: 
" At least there is one good general among them 
now — Gen. January! He will bring matters to 
[250] 



THE CONQUEROR 

a head." And later on: "Gen. January wasn't 
quite up to the mark, but wait! — ^you'll see that 
Gen. February will make short work of this war." 
Well, he didn't, and the real hero of the Great 
War was yet to appear and make his coup de 
main: which I am now about to relate to you. 

THE WORST of the winter was over. Gen- 
eral February had retired, having done his 
utmost to rout the two great armies locked in 
an unyielding embrace. General March had then 
come on with more than his usual snowing and 
blowing, and such was the fury of his assault that 
for a moment it seemed as though he would break 
the deadlock and whistle the combatants away. 
But he too failed, and recalling all his windy 
heralds and trumpeters, was presently forced to 
retire in high dudgeon. 

Now, with the first mildness of the spring, a 
change began to make itself manifest in the war. 
There was a great abatement of the ferocity which 
had marked its earlier stages. Attacks and coun- 
ter-attacks were still frequent along the extensive 
battle line separating the two great armies, but 
the tale of those killed in such encounters dimin- 

[251] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

ished daily — nay, it was even rumoured that the 
fighting was of a half-hearted kind. Also it began 
to be whispered that the hostile armies had neigh- 
boured each other so long in all the cold and misery 
and privation of the trenches, with bleak Nature 
as their common enemy, that they now found it 
impossible to attack with the old fury and hatred. 

But it turns out that there was even a more 
potent cause at work than the amity which these 
racial enemies had found for each other in the long 
winter months of that terrible struggle. The real 
Hero of the war — the conqueror himself was on 
the point of appearing! 

A relaxation of discipline became the general 
order — a relaxation marked by some painful yet 
ludicrous incidents. A German soldier was court- 
martialled for failing to salute his captain — ^than 
which, as is well known, no offence could be more 
heinous to the Teutonic mind. His excuse was 
that he had started to do so, but with hand half- 
uplifted had been obliged to stop and scratch him- 
self in a particularly odious manner. He threw 
himself upon the mercy of the court and implored 
his captain in moving tones to admit that he him- 
self had set the example. At this the members 
[252] 



THE CONQUEROR 

of that stern court evinced an unheard-of emotion, 
and, as by a common impulse, all began to scratch 
themselves! The soldier was dismissed with a light 
reprimand and withdrew, scratching himself grate- 
fully to the last. 

An attempt was then made to adapt the require- 
ments of the manual of arms to this odd physical 
necessity, but it was only partially successful, and 
a perfect fury of scratching seized upon the whole 
army. This hateful exercise was practised every- 
where and in the highest company. It was even 
found impossible to forbid it to the very waiters 
and other menials when serving princes and high- 
nesses and excellencies. Noblesse oblige! These 
exalted personages soon adapted themselves to the 
unpleasant condition, without serious loss of dig- 
nity. Indeed it was soon noticed, as a vindication 
of the aristocratic idea, that the nobilities scratched 
themselves with an air distinct from that of the 
common soldiers; but it must be added, with no 
less heartiness. 

Similar scenes, with a like accompanying laxity, 
were observed in the French and English camps. 
In the former, the humourous imagination of the 
common soldier had devised a complete scratching 

[253] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

manual or tactic. This had a very droll effect 
when performed in unison by a whole company, 
as it frequently was ; but it must be allowed that 
the fibre of discipline was much weakened by these 
exhibitions. 

The English were more stolid in their perform- 
ances, as was to be expected from the national 
character, but they too scratched with great vigour, 
and as if such occupation were dearer to them than 
defeating the enemy. The amount of bad lan- 
guage and profane blasphemy thereby released 
among them was much greater than in the other 
camps, but it would be an error to regard this 
solely as an indication of ill temper, such freedom 
of expression being a favourite relief with the war- 
like English. 

SUCH WAS the annoying condition among 
these unfortunate men-at-arms when one 
morning in early April the Sun, as if heartily 
entering into the jest, threw an unwonted heat 
upon them. The eifect was truly indescribable 
(this is one of the seven oldest phrases in the 
world, but there is nothing to take its place). 
Every man felt as if he was being eaten alive, 
[254] 



THE CONQUEROR 

and the futility of men scratching with only- 
ten finger-nails was instantaneously recognized 
throughout those mighty hosts. They wavered 
still a moment, and then as another searching beam 
came from old Sol, they broke into imiversal flight, 
throwing away arms and clothes as they ran — but 
always scratching! Camps and entrenchments 
were abandoned with all their munitions, booty, etc. 
In a few hours that immense theatre of war was 
completely deserted and Silence had resimied her 
dominion over the scene (this phrase is also very 
ancient but quite indispensable to the serious 
writer). The hero had come at last. The 
CONQUEROR had done his work. The Great War 
was over! 

RECENT AS was this surprising event, it 
seems strange that there should be any ques- 
tion as to the identity of the real hero who brought 
it to pass. But already it is clear that, perhaps 
from motives of national diffidence, an attempt 
is being made to rob him of the credit, not merely 
of a great victory but of the far greater glory 
of restoring peace to a world and ending a war 
which had threatened to engulf civihzation itself. 

[255] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

Envy quibbles over the name of the Illustrious 
Hero, seeing that it cannot dispute his achieve- 
ment. Thus, some authorities leaning to the 
German side call him gen. laus; while some 
favouring the French name him gen. pou (not to 
be confounded with Gen. Pau) . What the Eng- 
lish call him is left to the discreet conjecture of 
the reader. 

Perhaps I may add, as a moral, that thus it will 
be seen the public is never really disappointed of 
its hero in like circumstances: come he infallibly 
will, though to be sure, not always in the form 
and shape demanded by the popular imagination. 



[256] 



FOUR 



JTWO PICTURES 



THERE IS a famous passage in Carlyle 
which describes the meeting of two hostile 
armies arrayed for mutual slaughter and waiting 
only the word of their commanders. The com- 
mon men of whom these armies are made up have 
not the slightest grievance on the one side or the 
other, nor are they moved by the least animosity. 
No supreme cause of country has called them into 
the field — they are there simply in obedience to 
the summons of their rulers, for reasons which 
touch them not at all, which do not concern their 
private fortunes or interests, and which they are 
not suffered to understand. Yet at the call of 
authority they have abandoned their wives and 
children, their fathers and mothers, their sweet- 
hearts or promised brides, — yes, all that attaches 
them to life, in order to shed their innocent blood 
and the blood of others innocent as themselves, 

[257] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

merely to gratify some capricious whim, some 
guilty or vain ambition of their rulers. 

On each side there are priests actively exhorting 
these common men to do their duty : that is, to shed 
their common blood with courage, as they hope for 
salvation through the merciful wounds of Christ. 
And the priests are very careful to point out that 
in so doing they are but obeying the will of God, 
as expressed through their rulers, His chosen rep- 
resentatives. Now as this plea is put forth by 
the priests on both sides, and indeed ever has been 
since men first banded to slay and rob their kind, 
it follows that the horrible blasphemy is achieved 
of making God chiefly responsible for the crime 
of war! 

Thus braced and stimulated by the blessing of 
religion, these common men prepare bravely to 
slaughter their fellows and to submit to be slaugh- 
tered themselves; telling themselves that it must 
be the right thing to do, since their rulers desire 
it and the priests sanction it. Yet they go to the 
killing with reluctance or indifference, at first, 
until very soon, with the blind fury and savagery 
which the spirit of war engenders, they are changed 
in despite of themselves. From harmless common 
[258] 



TWO PICTURES 

men, thinking only with regret of their abandoned 
homes and dear ones, of their peaceful occupations, 
the idle plough and loom and workshop, — they 
are in a few moments turned into murderers, 
delighting and exulting in the slaughter of their 
fellows, maddened by the sight of blood, crazy to 
kill — ^kill — kill! — and lost to the instincts of 
humanity. 

Something like this is the terrible image of war 
called up by Carlyle's famous description. I have 
here employed the idea — not the words. 

There is another picture of two armies drawn 
by the hand of Karl Marx the Socialist, which, 
though not now so famous and admired as that of 
Carlyle, will in time to come be far more cele- 
brated, invoking greater praise and blessing upon 
the name of its author. It is in truth less a picture 
than a prophecy whose fulfilment no remote gen- 
eration is surely destined to see. 

Karl Marx describes the meeting of the armies 
for battle in much the same manner as Carlyle. 
They are made up of common men — ^that most 
abundant food for cannon. They are summoned 
to the field by their rulers and have themselves 
no interest or stake in the matter, no cause at 

[259] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

issue, no passion of hatred or revenge to gratify ; 
nor is there any true interest of patriotism to be 
served by the conflict to which they are driven. 
However, the priests are on hand to supply the 
cordials of faith and absolution; and after making 
the usual exhortation, they retire to the rear. 

The armies are now face to face and almost eye 
to eye, when at the signal for battle given simul- 
taneously on both sides, the mighty host of arrayed 
enemies throw down their weapons and with one 
universal hurrah rush into each other's arms! 

In that tremendous shout the Spectre of War 
vanishes forever. The priests and the vultures 
leave the field where the Brotherhood of Man cele- 
brates its holy rites. The rulers abdicate their 
thrones and the Era of Humanity begins. . . . 

Who would not prefer the picture of Karl 
Marx? Who would not do what in him lies to 
speed the day of its realization? Who does not 
believe that what is now happening throughout 
Europe makes that Day as inevitable as the rising 
of the Sun of Justice! 



[260] 



TWO PICTURES 

DEAD MEN are not the only fruit of war. 
Bellona gives life as well as death. Venus 
and Mars are the most ancient of lovers, and not 
the least fruitful. Even in the midst of slaughter 
and destruction, life preserves its eternal calcula- 
tion : the seeds of another harvest are sown. Death 
never wholly conquers; Life never entirely per- 
ishes: they are equal and eternal duelists. 

And Life goes singing to Death for Love has 
met and kissed him on the way. Euoe Bacchel — 
wait for the harvest ! . . . 

Listen! I lay no claim to prophecy, but this I 
will hazard: after the war there will be such a 
bursting forth and expansion of the joy of life 
that the oldest man shall not remember to have 
seen the hke. The world will go en fete and with 
the harvests gathered on a hundred battle-fields 
celebrate the return of happiness and hope and 
security. Euoe BaccTie! From the lush fruits of 
harvest gathered above the deep dreaming dead, 
men will pluck an unwonted desire for all the 
sweets of life — as if those who fell under the hand 
of Death, ere they might taste and enjoy, had so 
bequeathed their longing. Ah, terrible indeed 

[261] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

must be those joys that shall content both the 
living and the dead! Think of the countless host 
of young men, the picked flower of their several 
races, who died without having known more than 
the desire to love. 

O Hymen Hymenae iOj 
O Hymen Hymenaee! 

They that fell sleep longing for a red lip and 
a white bosom will not be wholly cheated of their 
desire. The kisses of which they but dreamed will 
fructify in the wondrous harvest. Happy the 
lovers that survive! 

OH, YES, it will be a grand time for Eros and 
Bacchus and all those ancient gods and god- 
desses whose business it formerly was to preside 
over the joys of human life. Indeed, they still 
revisit us from time to time and take a hand at 
their old functions, though we call them by ugly 
barbarian names and pretend to cut their classic 
acquaintance. They will all come back, Pan and 
Sylvanus, the ruddy laughing God of the grape, 
and droll Silenus, the saucy smiling Eros, the fauns 
[262] 



TWO PICTURES 

and the satyrs, the free graces, the nymphs and the 
dryads, to hold such revels as have not been enacted 
among men since Olympus went out of fashion. 
Life is pagan, death is Christian: be sure the old 
gods will not fail this opportunity to repossess 
themselves of the world stolen from them by the 
Galilean. At least they will make a glorious try 
for it. Euoe BaccJie! . . . 

Life is coming back from death, while the desire 
of the many who were cut off in their bloom will 
soon burst forth in wondrous purple harvests — 
aye! in an efflorescence of joy that will overspread 
the whole earth. 

We have mourned long enough for the dead — 
soon we shall drink and forget, intoning our 
Nunc est hibendum! Life is for the living. Love 
and Beauty and Happiness are here forevermore. 
Euoe Bacche! 



[263] 



FIVE 



THE COLLECTOR 



YOUR TRUE collector, like the poet, is born 
— ^not made. 'Tis a passion that shows itself 
early in life, even as doth poetry. Here, alas, the 
likeness ends, for the collector survives the poet in 
the human breast. 

Who does not remember the schoolfellow that 
won away all his marbles and those of the other 
lads? How we used to gape and wonder at his 
luck, poor simpletons! — it was but the nascent 
genius of the collector. I recall, as a thing of yes- 
terday, such a young hunks taking me to his home 
and showing me, craftily bunked in the garret, all 
his " shining gain." Aladdin's treasure was beg- 
garly by comparison. I still feel the choking envy 
that rose within me at sight of that ghttering 
variegated heap of alleys, agates, bullseyes, and 
marbles. Since coming to years of maturity, the 
[264] 



THE COLLECTOR 

spectacle of no man's wealth has affected me half so 
much. And as I stood there mumping with impo- 
tent desire over those pellets of glass and clay, I felt 
a strange sinking at the heart, which an older wis- 
dom translates into the conviction that I would 
never become a collector. The presentiment was 
only too well founded — I have never collected any- 
thing that the world sets a price on, and to this 
hour I stand naked outside the Kingdom of 
Junk. . . . 

That collecting (in the technical sense) is car- 
ried to a point of unreason by many persons, may 
be easily granted. In strict fact, he is not worthy 
the proud title of Collector whose hobby appears 
anything short of a transcendent passion or mania 
for which he stands ever ready to risk life, limb, 
and fortune. Whip me those paltry varlets and 
pretenders who affect to be collectors from their 
base economies invested in the sweepings of cheap 
auction rooms: — it is not with such canaille we 
have to do here. 

Collecting, like literature, has what may be 
called the grand style, which to achieve in some 
degree confers a sort of brevet or patent of esteem. 
It is a pursuit that has aristocratic affinities on 

[ 265 ] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

every side: hence, I suspect, the ardour with which 
it is followed in this country. 

My purpose is not to " catalogue " the collect- 
ing fraternity, whose name is Legion, nor to 
enumerate the objects of their perquisition, which 
span ahke the dictionary and the industry of man. 
Even to mention merely the principal classes of 
collectors were a mighty task. I content myself 
with glancing only at the collectors of printed 
things from Incunabula and Elzevirs to the broken 
volumes of Papyrus.* 

T'other day I was politely requested by a firm 
of Boston book-sellers to state " what special line 
of books I collected," a blank form being thought- 
fully provided for my reply, with a specimen page 
of a sort of collectors' Who's Who, which the said 
firm is to bring out. 

Really, Messieurs, you do me too much honour! 
I have not the vanity to aspire to be a Collector, 
and still less — pardon me — the pertinent and 
necessary pecunia. I get my books where I can, 
and I confess to a partiality for hunting them out 
in old-book stalls, those repositories of the only 

* The Papyrus : a small literary monthly edited by the writer :■ 
from 1903 to 1912. » 

[266 1 



THE COLLECTOR 

" second-hand " commerce which disgraces not the 
purchaser ; and I pay as little for them as I may. 
'Tis a traffic that appeals to me with its seemly 
pretence of learning on the part of the dealer, 
and that air of obliging you which no other mer- 
chant doth assume. But no " special line," if you 
please, echoing my Boston inquisitors; I can read 
any sort of book if it have literary life-blood in its 
veins. The counterfeits of such I abandon to the 
hieratic or professional collector, by whom they are 
sometimes fabulously rated. 

I suspect the vanity of exclusive possession is 
three-fourths of the collecting mania, but there 
can be, and commonly are, subsidiary motives, 
such as (I regret to say) pride of money, snob- 
bery, the itch of singularity, pretence of learning, 
and mere pedantry. Indeed, though it irks me to 
censure ever so lightly any devotee of the gentle 
art, it may not be denied that a prevailing type 
of rich book collector collects for his own credit 
and public repute, rather than from a genuine love 
of learning or literature: he is, as a witty writer 
has said, a man withj not of books. Of course, I 
refer only to the American species: but the same 
reproach has been often alleged against his Euro- 

[267] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

pean fellow. Horace Walpole is the model that 
both seek to pattern by: he was, as Macaulay 
describes him, an indefatigable collector of worth- 
less trifles and a prince among snobs. But he had 
distinction of a kind, and he remains the polished, 
perverse patron of rich collectors of the parvenu 
type. 

It is the custom of our American journalists, 
who love to mouth money above all things, and 
therefore print no end of nonsense about rich col- 
lectors, to congratulate such persons fulsomely on 
their acquisitions, and to ascribe both to them and 
their " treasures " an importance which neither can 
justify. The enormous prices alleged in the news- 
paper chronicle are seldom, if ever, paid; the 
actual value to the public of some of the costliest 
and most ambitious enterprises of the collector is 
little or nothing. Here, as elsewhere,, the jour- 
nalist lackeying the rich proves an unsafe guide. 

But my cue is rather the mania of collecting 
per se, of which Balzac has given us the heroic 
example in " Cousin Pons." That is a sad enough 
story, in all conscience, and generally speaking, I 
fear collectors do not have a merry time of it, spite 
of the flattering homage of the newspapers and 
[ 268 ] 



THE COLLECTOR 

the even sweeter envy of the neighbours. Their 
works cannot follow them, of course, when they 
become pulvis et umbrae and placens uxor (rarely 
in sympathy with our manias) in default of strict 
testamentary injunction, is quick to hustle a life's 
accumulated treasures to the auction rooms. All 
are dispersed to ahen hands, and Defunctus, in- 
stead of the proud memorial bust and tablet he had 
promised himself in some great library or museum, 
has this for his epitaph: Vanitas vanitatum! 

I have been led into these somewhat drab reflec- 
tions by seeing lately advertised, at auction sale, a 
hbrary of rare books belonging to a collector whom 
I had quite intimately known. This worthy gen- 
tleman collected from as honest a motive as any, 
yet it were more than human if he found himself 
averse to the sort of notice heaped upon him by 
fulsome newspapers and flattering friends. His 
" great learning " was constantly referred to, 
which he, a cultivated man, but not at all a pro- 
found scholar nor privately claiming the character, 
took no pains to deprecate. And certainly there 
was great learning in his house, within the musty 
ancient folios or black-letter tomes, in the acquisi* 
tion of which he had spent a considerable fortune^ 

[269] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

It is very singular how a ruling passion grows, 
and surely the passion of collecting is no excep- 
tion. 

In the beginning this man owned his books, but 
when the mania reached its height, they literally 
owned him. Showing me his Hbrary of Incunabula 
— early printed books in Latin which he could not 
read for the hfe of him — ^he said that to get some 
volumes which would fill out his collection he 
would be strongly tempted to sacrifice the remain- 
der of his patrimony. 

This was certainly the vanity of possession, for 
as he could not read the books in their Latin text, 
it would be foolish to suppose that his passion was 
that of the scholar. No, it was the true mania of 
the collector: others with longer purses had out- 
bidden him in his desire, and the fact left him 
craving and unhappy. 

I can not myself see much use for a library of 
books mildewed and mummified by the lapse of 
centuries, which one does not read, and scarcely 
dare handle, and which one has to keep in fire- 
proof cases or at the Safe Deposit. (My friend 
actually kept there his most treasured volumes.) 
A book is the most familiar creature possible: life 
[270] ^ 



THE COLLECTOR 

offers us little to rival its companionship. Now 
to lock it up in a steel box, preserving it for a 
barren non-use, seems to me as foolish a thing as 
ever man conceived. 

Add the consideration that all such books are to 
be had in plain honest English, if of the least 
value, and for little above the price of herrings, — 
and really I don't see what excuse there can be 
for such learned rubbish, outside a museum. That 
a man should spend his money and his life in the 
work of collecting these cast-off reliquaries of 
thought, these exuviae of erudition, is quite beyond 
my philosophy. But there^ of course, is the 
mania. ... 

And I will not say (though I be myself lacking 
in the stuff of which your preux collector is made) 
that there is not something fine and heroic in the 
hobby. It is a passion at least, and a man with 
a passion may be condemnable in a hundred ways, 
but he cannot fail to be interesting and alive. 
This is always true of the greater sort of collec- 
tors: their strifes and emulations, their counter- 
marches and campaigns, have something Homeric 
about them, and the tale is one to which the world 
seldom inclines a careless ear. . . . 

[271] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

When Goodman Grandet, urged by greed rather 
than devotion, snatches at the silver crucifix in his 
dying convulsion, we are not shocked, so true is 
the touch of art; and we applaud Balzac for this 
bold depiction of the ruling passion strong even 
in death. . . . 

To live a collector is to die a collector! 

I doubt not that my friend's last conscious 
thought was of his books and of the enduring 
monument they would raise for him in the public 
remembrance. Having no children of his body, he 
might rely on them alone to carry his name to a 
far posterity. Hence, my sorrow at seeing them 
" put up and knocked down," as the shop phrase 
brutally has it, at public auction. It was, of a 
truth, in ghastly fashion like putting the man him- 
self up and knocking him down; and I did not 
stay to see how his treasures went. However, the 
humour of the situation was saved by the presence 
of his brother collectors, competitors in the acqui- 
sition of Incunabula, etc., who seemed eager to 
despoil him as they will in turn be despoiled. . . . 

Not to end upon a sad note, I urge the gentle 
reader, if he is not now a collector, to become one 
forthwith. 'Tis an amiable passion that adds a 
[272] 



THE COLLECTOR 

great zest to life — nay, many wise persons think, 
prolongs it. For it is not to be doubted that the 
years of desire mark that term of life in which we 
are most thoroughly and vitally alive — not an inert 
nerve or pulse anywhere. Begin then to collect, 
by all means ( — there are my own trifling Works 
and the aforementioned broken volumes of Papy- 
rus) . For to desire something is to want to get 
or collect it: and whilst we collect we live! 



[273] 



SIX 



THE PENMAN 



T'OTHER DAY, on the Main street of our 
town, I saw a man pursuing tranquilly an 
occupation which will ere long be listed with the 
abandoned trades. In point of fact, this particu- 
lar craft or art (as I might almost call it) is little 
practised nowadays, and seldom seen except in 
country places. Even there it has much descended 
from its pristine dignity and has something of a 
barely tolerated character, while its practitioners 
have fallen to the level of street fakirs. 

The man was writing cards at fifteen cents the 
dozen, and seemed to be doing a brisk trade. 
About a score of persons were gathered about his 
chair and table, some of them following with open 
mouth his curious skill. He was a very large man 
for such delicate work, and fat withal, but still he 
seemed perfectly cool, good-natured and comfort- 
able. I joined the group of his patrons and 
[274] 



THE PENMAN 

admirers; it was years since I had seen anybody 
earning a livelihood in that way. 

A single glance told me that he was master of 
his art (really I must call it so) . He wrote v/ith 
astonishing swiftness and perfect execution; never 
blotting, or spoiling, or making a false-stroke; 
turning out the cards, dozen after dozen, with 
uniform ease and celerity. This mountain of a 
man had yet a small shapely hand which traced a 
script that an angel might envy; moreover, with 
curves and flourishes and shading that vividly 
brought back to me that terror and obsession of 
my school-days — the Spencerian Copy Book! 

As the fat man pranced and pirouetted, cut the 
figure eight, looped the loop and did everything 
imaginable with that wonderful pen of his — it 
stood out at a right angle from the holder in a 
knowing fashion — I ran over in my mind some of 
the miseries I had undergone (the whole could 
not be told) owing to this cursed Spencerian pen- 
manship. 



[275] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

THE SPENCERIAN Copy Book shades with 
horror (I am too sad to intend a pun)' 
those early school-days; even now I can not recall 
it without a sickening sense of incapacity and fail- 
ure. Humbly persuaded am I that no clumsy- 
pawed urchin ever made a worse botch of the 
Spencerian. The most prodigious pains resulted 
only in a horrid travesty, and a cursed trick I had 
of smearing the page at the last moment, necessi- 
tating a fresh copy, gave a Sisyphean cast to my 
labours. The fact that my own father was the 
teacher made things almost hopeless, for it seemed 
harder to please him than anybody else, and when 
the punitive ruler came down upon my poor 
awkward young fingers, I felt that despair 
which childhood only knows, even more than 
the pain. 

What a fearful tyranny the Spencerian was, and 
not less a humbug! For how in common sense 
could a fumbling young lad be expected to produce 
a fair copy of that perfect script executed by the 
engraver's art? My father could not do it him- 
self, nor many another teacher; but I was beaten 
for my failure. As well beat me for my inability 
[ 276 ] 



THE PENMAN 

to walk on knives. I could not see the fairness 
of it then; I can not now. O those burning tears 
of youth, and that heart choking with the sense of 
undeserved punishment and injustice! If ever I 
have been a rebel since and a contemner of author- 
ity, if ever I have been a giber and a scoffer at 
things conventional or of the Copy Book order, 
let the Spencerian bear the blame ! 

I can not hope by any effort of language to 
express my envy and admiration of the boy who 
could passably imitate the Spencerian headlines 
in the copy books. Such a phenomenon turned up 
from time to time, and I envied and admired him 
with a sincerity inspired by the absolute convic- 
tion that I should not be able to do likewise in 
nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine years. 
As to that point my judgment was precociously 
correct — I still write what is technically termed 
a " rotten hand " (without a trace of the Spen- 
cerian influence) , and the wise printer will not set 
up my copy except at price and a half. The test 
of reading it is the hardest I can propose to a 
stenographer — few are equal to the same. And 
to be strictly candid, I now and then throw off 
a page of caligraphic beauty (remote from the 

[277] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

Spencerian model) which the writer is himself 
unable to decipher. 

The Spencerian has thus embittered my life, for 
I would have learned the typewriter in my jour- 
nalistic period (as many reporters were obliged to 
do) but for the spirit of rebellion and ungodliness 
which that infernal system had engendered in me. 
I have had a machine in my house these dozen 
years, but I have never learned so much as to 
print my name — for the same reason. My present 
means of communicating my literary expression is 
about as choice a specimen of kakography as a 
captious connoisseur could desire to see. But I 
know what it cost me to acquire it, in spite of the 
Spencerian, and nothing shall ever wrest it from 
me — not even a typewriter! For in clinging to 
it thus stubbornly and passionately, I feel that I 
am somehow evening accounts with the monster 
that desolated my tender youth. . . . 

THE FAT penman wrote right along while 
I was thinking as above, and I reckon he 
made sixty cents while I was losing both time and 
money. He was about my own age and might 
easily have been one of those boy wonders at my 
[278] 



THE PENMAN 

father's school, who could do anything they liked 
with the Spencerian. (We were led to expect that 
they would infallibly get to be president of the 
bank, etc., but somehow they always came short of 
these glorious hopes.) As I looked, the fat man 
deftly traced a lovely swan with a scroll in its beak, 
bearing the name of a young lady from Rowayton, 
who blushed with pleasure as she received it. 

The fat one made her a very graceful bow, and 
the tail of his eye descending caught mine with 
a barely perceptible wink. There was drollery 
too in this otiose villain, who sat enormous but at 
perfect ease, plying his little pen; while we his 
vulgar clientele gaped and sweated round him. 

An artist, I said to myself, turning away, and 
a hero as well, for did he not conquer the Spen- 
cerian, that dragon of my school days? But unless 
an apoplexy helps him off, I fear the day is not 
far distant when he will have to hunt another job. 



[279] 



SEVEN 



CHANTICLEER 



Ti/TAN, WHETHER of city or country, is 
■^^ ^ largely the creature of habit. 

One realizes this especially in regard to one's 
sleep — a problem that perplexes most of us sooner 
or later, who have too curiously meddled with our 
brains. And after trying both, one discovers that 
there is not so much noise in the city nor so much 
quiet in the country. There are those who sleep 
soundly and those who sleep badly in both places. 
It really makes no difference. Of course this 
corner of Connecticut is not what my little girl 
calls the " really real " country: it is but, so to say, 
semi-rural, uniting at odd times and in an exqui- 
site degree, the disadvantages of both rus and urbs. 

But my argument as to the sleep still holds, for 
the poet Richard Le Gallienne, who lives at 
Tokeneke in the deep country a few miles from 
[ 280 ] 



CHANTICLEER 

me, has written an inspiring poem to "A Bird 
at Dawn." 

I suspect it was not Richard's choice to be awake 
in the chilly grey morn and listen to the ethereal 
bird. Or maybe he only made-believe to have 
heard it: poets are long on imagination anyway, 
and most of 'em that I have known would never 
have heard a bird at dawn unless they had been 
out all night on a lark! 

However, if we take Richard's poetic word for 
it, he was indeed broad awake when most of us 
want to be asleep and heartily curse the milkman 
or the neighbour's dog for breaking our matutinal 
slumbers. And that's the point that concerns us 
in this little homily. 

When we lived in the Big City I used to have 
a " white night " from time to time. This was 
due not so much to early piety as to a habit I had 
formed of reading and smoking abed. A delicious 
habitude, I still protest, and one shrewdly suited to 
the philosophic temper; but I must allow that it 
has certain drawbacks. There was a risk of in- 
voluntary self-cremation, which kept the family 
in a state of expectant terror. There were occa- 
sional petty damages to the bed-clothes, to the 

[281] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

reader's " nighty " or pajamas — the small toll he 
paid for snatching his " fearful joy." And there 
was — worst of all and the only thing that moved 
him to real remorse — the speeding up of the mental 
wheels that led to the inevitable White Night! 

Well, as I was saying, I didn't leave it behind 
me in the city: it still calls on me from time to 
time, although lately I am more given to perpen- 
dicular smoking (oh, I sometimes taste the sweet- 
ness of a relapse!), and I try to govern the 
" wheels " with a wiser care. Alas, how powerless 
are we to control that strange mechanism which 
tyrannizes over our life! 

But I do not fear my white nights so much as 
formerly in the city, where one was crushed and 
overborne on every side with human life : here there 
be certain dulcifying circumstances added to the 
old Terror, which just now made me think of 
Richard and his " Bird at Dawn." He does not 
name the feathered warbler that gave him his 
delightful experience and indirectly enriched the 
world with a new joy. A bird, he says: no more. 
It is also to a bird that I owe the reHef that has 
come to my insomnia, but I need not be so reticent 
as the poet: — ^my bird at dawn is Chanticleer. 
[ 282 ] 



CHANTICLEER 

And how shall I describe the anodyne he brings 
me under the stress of my own self-evoked tor- 
ture? . . . 

It is always the same fight that wears out the 
dark hours. I try to think that I am not trying 
to go to sleep — the prescription of some heaven- 
born genius ; and, as always, make a most exquisite 
failure of it. I invent weird variations upon the 
usual gymnastic of insomnia; I try every known 
posture and almost fetch up standing on my head. 
Then I say to myself, " This is foolish. I must 
not contend with it. I must simply ignore — for- 
get it and go passively to sleep." Excellent! — 
and I proceed to lie more or less passively awake 
for hours. The humiliation of the defeat — the 
consciousness that it is girding at one — that is per- 
haps the worst part of the punishment. 

Sometimes I come very near to fooling it by 
listening to the trains. A great railroad runs not 
far from my house, and goodness knows how many 
trains pass to and fro at night. It is curious that 
I never give them a momentary attention in the 
dayhght; they simply mean nothing to me. But 
in the dark night when I lie sleepless, yet perhaps 
not in full waking consciousness, the trains domi- 

[ 283 ] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

n,ate my thought. I yield myself willingly to this 
obsession, hoping that they may carry me away 
from it: — and sooth to say, often they do. These 
escapes are among the most ticklish experiences 
of my insomnia, and I would not deny that there 
is some compensation in the adventure. 

But, at best, they are interludes as rare as fortu- 
nate, not to be counted upon for the real bad 
nights: — then, however patiently I listen to the 
long roll of the trains, filling our quiet valley with 
the shattering thunder of their advance or the 
mighty echoes of their retreat; attentive to their 
distant calls and signals, a formidable antiphony, 
and to all the heart-moving alarums of their tre- 
mendous rallies under the night sky; yet am I 
still dry-eyed and feverishly awake when the earli- 
est raucous mutterings of Chanticleer from his 
cooped security very near, begin at length to 
unhinge my rigid mind and incline it toward sleep. 
He is the true warder of Morpheus: — what sooth- 
ing peace in those first notes that irresistibly invite 
one to snuggle down and lose the tyranny of the 
night watches in a delicious haven of rest! How 
I bless the homely, domestic bird, true friend of 
man and eke his bountiful provider, beyond any 
[ 284 ] 



CHANTICLEER 

bulbul or nightingale or lark or thrush that ever 
inspired the happiest rhymes of poet. Now my 
senses delicately drowse while I hear the Goodman 
telling his duteous wives that he is about to bring 
back day and light again. Admirable boaster! — 
sapient natin-alist! — 'tis not I would say thee nay. 
I catch their sleepy, syncopated remarks of loyal 
praise and admiration; but I am quite gone over- 
board and sunk in the ocean of oblivion, deeper 
than plummet e'er sounded, before the Coop bursts 
into full matin chorus. 

Ah, Monsieur le Coq, good master Gallus, brave 
and worthy Chanticleer, honest lover of the warm, 
brown earth, I set thee above the feathered vani- 
ties that despise thee on thy dunghill. Thy hum- 
ble life is all service and giving; thou art besides 
a model citizen, keeping thy wives in order and 
acquitting all thy duties with a relishing zeal. I 
salute thee, ancient witness and sharer of man's 
best life, and were I a poet like neighbour Le 
Gallienne, I would honour thee with a song that 
should put to blush the finest madrigals in praise 
of those that contemn thee. What is, forsooth, all 
this folderol and skimble-skamble stuff about night- 
ingales and birds of dawn, etc., compared to thy 

[ 285 ] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

terrene and solid virtues? Gladly I avail myself 
of the following simple yet inspiring verses which 
but do thee merited honour, and for which I am 
indebted to a modest poet whose virtues court the 
shade. Heartily I endorse his sentiments and hope 
they may find some responsive echo in a world 
where man is lowering his crest and the hen-minded 
threaten to usurp dominion. 

THE COCK CROW 

(Written at 4 A. M. on being awakened by a 
rooster.) 

Greeting to thee, oh Chanticleer, 
That hailest the rising sun! 
Brave herald of our masculinity. 
Lord of the barnyard. 
In this age of crowing hens 
And cackling capons 
Whom the hens do scorn and peck; 
A henpecked age that says 
All fowls must crow 
And cackling is the part 
Of those " weak things " 
Who but lay eggs 
And hatch the coming generations. 
[286 ] 



CHANTICLEER 

Thy head erect, thy crest and plumes 

Proclaim the dominance of the male. 

When thou thy clarion call dost still 

And hens borrow thy spurs to fight 

To rule the roost. 

And pluck thy plumes 

To deck themselves withal. 

What fate is thine, O noble bird! 

What spurious call is that 

Which greets the setting sun? 

The crow of feminism's strident squeak, 

Its brood in incubators. 

Letting the emancipated mother hens 

"Lead their own lives/' 

Repudiate their motherhood 

And duties to their race. 

Crow on, O Chanticleer, crow on! 

For when thy call is stilled. 

Then race is dead, and art is dead. 

And love is dead. 

And unseoced hens can neither breed 

Nor do thine errand in a world of strife! 



[287] 



EIGHT 



THE CIRCUS 



IT IS about the kalends of May when the world 
grows beautiful again under the touch of 
Spring ; when the pain and uselessness of toilsome 
effort presents itself as an overwhelmingly new 
consideration; when all out-of-doors breathes an 
irresistible invitation to come and play; when in 
truth everybody hates to work and the rural school- 
boy incited by certain flaming, variegated posters 
on the dead-walls, thinks of playing hookey for 
good and running away with the circus, and hesi- 
tates only between the choice of bareback riding 
and the flying trapeze. I pity the man who in his 
youth never entertained this dazzling idea, and I 
should be wary of doing business with him. 

I was chewing the end of my pen this morning 
and waiting for an idea — ^which would not come, 
perhaps because I was not voting unanimously 
for it — a state of mental recalcitrance not im- 
[288] 



THE CIRCUS 

proved by the chirping of an ecstatic robin on a 
maple branch just outside my window — when after 
some hesitant scuffling the attic door opened and 
there appeared a Delegation composed of the 
Three Youngest — aged respectively ten, eight, and 
five— who with a unanimity that spoke of thorough 
rehearsal, burst out clamorously — 

'' Pa, we. want you to take us to the Circus! " 

Bless my soul, I thought, what better thing can 
I do? And as the weak minority of me thus 
yielded, the Idea fled, saying, " I knew all along 
that he didn't want me to-day." Then as I cast 
aside my work, the robin trilled forth a sarcastic 
roundelay — just look at the malice of that, when 
he knew how much he was to blame! I don't care, 
I said, it is the Spring — and only the Circus 
can give you a real chance to be young again 
with the kiddies. It is their Lupercal — perish the 
task that would forbid these joyous rites! Let 
them lead me, I said, to the Aggregated Marvels 
of the Mastodonic Menagerie — to the glittering 
Ensemble of the Picturesque and Panethnic Pro- 
cession — to the Riotous Resilience and Rutilant 

[289] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

Splendour of the Roman Chariot Race — to the 
subordinate, but no less Seductive Symposium of 
Segregated Wonders in the Sideshows — ^yea, even 
(Virtue, be calm!) let them guide my fainting 
steps to the Ten Thousand Dollar Beauty Show, 
to that Dazzling and Delicious Divan of Diapha- 
nous Divinities — and I will consume peanuts with 
the youngest of 'em. Ma! get the children ready! 

WHEN I WAS a boy in a little town on the 
Mohawk River up in New York State — a 
town that was very much alive with the whir of 
spindles and all manner of factories — there were 
two overshadowing events in the year — Circus and 
Fourth o' July. Other hohdays there were, of 
course, but none of them — not even Christmas — 
meant anything like the same pleasure and antici- 
pation to me. Perhaps because I was the kind 
of boy that had to look for his good times mainly 
on the outside. I fancy most motherless boys, 
without even sisters to help bring them up, would 
be of my taste in the matter — a taste for the 
sterner holidays. 

Life was therefore of small account between 
Circus and Circus (I omit from present considera- 
[290] 



THE CIRCUS 

tion the glorious Feast of Noise and Flame). 
I tried to save up my pennies, not easily come by, 
for the one as for the other; but from an early 
weakness of economy, as well as the parental par- 
simony, often found myself without the means of 
entertainment. Something like despair I have 
known since as a man, but nothing to compare 
with the bottom-out-of -all-things, end-of-the-world 
dejection and despondency of one small boy with- 
out even a lonesome nickel to bless himself with 
on Circus Day. Do you wonder that the Dele- 
gation mentioned above found me so easy? . . . 
What an event was the coming of the Circus to 
the small boy population of our town! Nothing 
else was thought of, from the appearance of the 
first posters to the arrival of the show, heralded 
by strings of uncommon looking horses. Not the 
most ordinary courier or outrider but excited the 
deepest interest and was the object of endless curi- 
osity and speculation. Whether the Circus was 
big or just medium size made no particular mat- 
ter to us — it was a circus, that was enough, and 
we were equally interested whether it came by 
special train with imposing cars of unwonted con- 
struction for the menagerie, or just rolled into 

[291] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

town by the turnpike in its own tented wagons. 
It was romance in the concrete — the visualization 
of wonder — ^the reahty of adventure brought near, 
all accompanied with that strange plucking at the 
heart which only boyhood knows, and for which 
it is most to be envied and regretted. 

I would give much to recall my feelings when 
I had slept with one eye open in order to get up 
at cock-crow to see the Circus pitch its tents on 
Bilbrow's field, a space big enough for a Roman 
hippodrome. But of this I am sure, that romance 
has never spread a scene of such enchantment be- 
fore my eyes. Oh, the heart-stirring excitement 
when the canvasmen, — those extra-blasphemous 
navigators of the circensian ocean — raised the 
great centre-pole of the Main Tent! It might 
have been done with less noise and swearing, per- 
haps, but would it have impressed me half so 
much? How cheerful the sight of them messing 
in the open air, while an immensely fat and good- 
natured black cook roasted huge steaks over a 
cunning camp fire! How I longed to get away 
from the tyranny of tasks and to be a part of that 
life, so free and careless, yet full of adventure it 
seemed; and how I envied the boy who, from time 
[292] 



THE CIRCUS 

to time, ran away with the Circus ! What became 
of that hero of one's early admiration seems, by 
the way, as profound a mystery as the ordinary 
failure of the head boy in school to take all the 
prizes in after hfe. I know for sure, at any rate, 
that he never got to own the Circus, and I suspect 
he paid dearly for his romantic yearnings. But 
as a boy, I would have enthusiastically swapped 
any future whatever for his chance. 

All the details of this strange nomadic caravan 
life appealed to the boyish sense of wonder, which 
even transfigured the rough servants of the scene, 
as being of the fellowship of Aladdin. Those can- 
vasmen, for instance, were the toughest lot of 
rowdies that could be picked up by the manage- 
ment, skilled in assembling that sort of material. 
They were in fact chosen for their fighting ability 
and disposition. Their manners were soft and 
gentle in keeping. I do not believe that any sort 
of human creature has ever surpassed the circus- 
man of those times in the art of obscene blasphemy. 
His manners may be, and doubtless are, changed 
for the better, and he is now selected for peace 
rather than war. But my boyish memory is still 
fain to dwell on him as a spouting geyser of to- 

[ 293 ] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

bacco-sprinkled invective ; an active volcano, so to 
speak, of sulphurous commination, whose cuss- 
words were merely the flowers of a picturesque 
rhetoric. In point of fact, the circusman 
swore rather more than seemed necessary even 
in his trying occupation, and I suspect that 
he did a lot of cussing just to keep up his 
courage. There was some occasion for this, I 
promise you. 

Rushing the canvasmen was in those days a 
favourite diversion of tough youth : hence, the mili- 
tant character of the tanbark retainers. There 
were places that the stoutest circusmen feared to 
" make," on account of the battles that were sure 
to be precipitated. Broken heads were not the 
most serious result of these scrimmages; some- 
times, though rarely, a life was taken on one side 
or the other, causing a bitter feud renewed each 
year on the visit of the Circus. On this account, 
there were not a few towns which every circus 
deemed it prudent to skip, though good show 
towns and directly in their circuit (as the itinerary 
was called). 

Our own town was pretty bad in this respect, 
owing to the large factory element in the popula- 
[294] 



THE CIRCUS 

tion. It had the dishonour of raising one of the 
worst criminal gangs in the State, the members 
of which, after consuming their youth in desperate 
feats of hardihood, mostly died in prison. I al- 
ways proudly understood that our town (in whose 
just fame for badness we small boys rejoiced) was 
one of those places the circusmen would rather have 
passed by. Certainly I saw some bloody battles 
between the canvas guardians and our tough youth, 
which gave an added spice of adventure to the 
marvels of the Circus. We small boys often 
profited by these encounters to scamper under the 
canvas and hoist ourselves to stations of safety — 
a perilous feat that set your heart thumping for 
an hour thereafter. But it meant getting some- 
thing more out of the Circus than the nice boy did, 
whose papa or mamma carefully ensconced him 
in a reserved seat, with a disgusting provision of 
popcorn and peanuts. All great experiences are 
bought at a price! 

I never see nowadays the type of young desper- 
ado who used then to affront the hardy canvas - 
men with their knotted clubs. He trusted to his 
hard fists as his only weapon, though his skill in 
tripping the adversary was not the least brilliant 

[295] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

feature of his attack. Ye gods of fistiana, what 
a rough-and-tumble fighter he was! — really, the 
battle that makes the sternest test of mettle and 
endurance. But alas! I sing the warriors of a 
past generation. Have we lost the secret of their 
breeding? I should think it a loss, if courage is 
to remain among the virtues of the sons of the 
people. The bold lads of whom I speak had a 
rough but not unworthy code of honour: they 
fought fair and eschewed the weapons of the 
assassin. 

COMES BACK to memory now the pale face 
and undaunted blue eyes of the picked dare- 
devil of them all, a warlike youth called " Grinny " 
Keogh. There was a certain consonance in this 
queer nickname, arising from the fact of his being 
always agrin, even when most minatory and dan- 
gerous. This peculiarity served him in good stead, 
for it usually fooled the enemy and gave him leave 
to get in the first blow, which was the heart of 
his tactics. He knew not what fear was, and he 
risked life and liberty to win and keep the admira- 
tion of his fellows. We younger ones looked up 
to him with a sort of idolatry of wonder, which 
[296] 



THE CIRCUS 

warms me even at this distance — a little matter of 
thirty-odd years! 

I see " Grinny " now, with one or two lieuten- 
ants, facing a burly canvajsman, while we younger 
ones, standing back a little, look on in a ravish- 
ment of terror and expectancy. 

" Grinny " is smiling his pale smile while he 
parleys with the man, who is guarding a stretch 
of canvas in the big tent which offers an easy 
entrance. The boy, though smiling, is tensed in 
all his slight figure for action, while his adversary 
stands relaxed and careless, not dreaming of an 
atxaci^. 

Suddenly I hear " Grinny " say, in a tone 
raised for our attention — " We're going in here. 
Rube, and you'd better not let on to notice us." 

The man's face changes and he makes as if to 
strike the daring lad, but in a twinkling " Grinny " 
lands a smashing blow and the canvasman takes 
the count, while a raft of boys scamper under the 
tent. Often have I seen " Grinny " walk away 
composedly after shooing in fifteen or twenty boys 
m this fashion. It is true that I have now and 
then seen some boys caught on the inside follow- 
ing such a raid and most unmercifully clubbed 

[ 297 ] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

— perhaps a few of them bear the marks to this 
day. But that never deterred the rest of us 
when " Grinny " Keogh gave the signal for rush- 
ing a canvasman. ... 

I should hate to try it to-day — and have I not 
said that the breed of " Grinny " Keogh has be- 
come extinct? — but I remain convinced that no 
better way has ever been thought of for a boy to 
get all there is of danger and delight and adven- 
ture out of the Circus. 



[298] 



NINE 



NOCTURNE 



MY GOD! how like a dream life passes! To- 
day we are young, with endless time be- 
fore us, free to postpone our most daring projects 
of ambition, of glory and fame; sure of ourselves, 
surer still of the vast credit of years we have at 
our disposal; content to dream of the task not 
yet begun and to anticipate the unearned reward. 
To-morrow we are of a sudden grown old, and all 
that limitless estate of time, with its possibilities 
of work to be done and glory to be achieved, seems 
shrunken to a hand's breadth, like the magic skin 
in Balzac's fable. All we know is that Youth 
was but just now here, and lo! it is gone. . . . 

It is an evening in early summer and the sky is 
still red with the reflections of sunset. The man, 
of middle age, sits by an open window, holding a 
book which he appears to read; but for some time 

[ 299 ] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

he has not turned a page. This the man's wife, 
a few years younger than he, does not perceive 
from her station on the other side of the room 
where, seated in an easy chair, she is dandling a 
young child. Nor is she conscious of her hus- 
band's gaze which from time to time rests upon 
her with a curious fixity and intentness that in- 
cludes the living woman no more than the book 
in his hand. 

The silence has not been broken for a long time, 
save by the cooing of the child: married persons 
of middle age do not much trouble each other with 
unnecessary conversation. 

His glance passes over the infant as ignoring it 
entirely, rather than with conscious indifference. 
Evidently it is not his child, for not so does a man 
of middle age regard such a pledge of love when 
it is his own. And though the woman's form 
plainly denotes her as having borne many children, 
there is lacking in her manner toward the babe on 
her lap that intangible something which affirms 
the mother. 

Let us peep over the man's shoulder and see 
what he reads at this twilight hour in the Book 
of his Life. 
[ 300 ] 



NOCTURNE 

AH, LIFE was good then, and better than 
they knew, in the prodigal spirit of youth. 
How sweet she was, the young wife, and how 
graceful her slim form and firm waist as yet un- 
spoiled by child-bearing. People often took her 
for the sister or nurse of her two children. He 
remembered her small pretty head, with the deli- 
cate ears, and the long shapely neck which he 
loved to kiss when she was doing up her bright 
hair. How adorable she was in the first years of 
their marriage, and what happiness was his in the 
fulness of youth and desire and possession! Oh, 
that enchanted cup! — if he might but drain it 
again, how would he linger over every drop and 
savour its sweetness to the last! And he cursed 
himself for a spendthrift who had taken no ac- 
count of his riches until all was gone. 

Then there came back to mind a pretty childish 
trick of hers which used to ravish his heart with 
pleasure. She would pretend sometimes to plead 
for a kiss, standing on tiptoe and making a comical 
imitation of a poodle that " begs." Nothing ever 
appeared so charming to him, he remembered with 
a pang at the heart, as again he saw that lovely 

[301] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

laughing face before him, and took it in his hands, 
and covered it with kisses. 

Ah, my God! where is now that fairy childhke 
form, those pleading lips and eyes in which youth 
incarnated all its innocence and all its charm? 
Gone as utterly as though the earth covered 
her. ... 

These dear joys were snatched in the scant lei- 
sure of a worker on the press, and he thought, with 
a curse, of the furious expenditure of energy by 
which he purchased that little home nest. His job 
was a " rotten " one, in newspaper dialect, being 
that of night editor on a morning sheet owned by 
three old men who hated and envied each other 
as only journalists can. It was at least a blessing 
that they went home at night and left him to get 
out the paper. But the effort required to please 
all three and to keep clear of the intrigues always 
hatching in that atmosphere of jealousy and sus- 
picion, made his place hateful to him. And how 
miserably they paid him for his hard service; how 
cunningly they b^gained with his youth and in- 
experience, though so greedy of money for them- 
selves ! 

Then he reflected that newspapers are built up 
[302] 



NOCTURNE 

on the wasted forces of young men for whom the 
work has a fascination, with its false challenge to 
talent and ambition. His own servitude had been 
long enough, God knows, consuming the flower 
of his youth, and often he lamented with helpless 
rage those bright years gone down forever into 
that Slough of Despond. But Youth and Love, 
in their eternal fashion, contrived to save some- 
thing from the wreck. There was this memory, 
for example, which now summoned echoes in 
his heart like those awakened by an old love 
tune 

He worked nights, but had Sunday off, when 
some member of the staff would take his desk and 
cherish a brief dream of succeeding him; for poor 
as his job was, everybody wanted it in that house 
of famine. Also the three old men varied the 
monotony of plotting against one another by fo- 
menting plots among the staff, which sagacious 
policy was supposed to promote esprit de corps. 

But nothing could spoil the enjoyment of those 
Sundays which absolutely were his, freed from the 
newspaper grind and its harassing anxieties. If 
the rival morning paper got a " scoop " on his 
substitute, there was nothing in that for him to 

[303] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

worry about. Nay, perhaps, as he was not him- 
self untouched by the mean spirit of the place and 
knew the calculations of the whelps around him, 
it might afford him a secret satisfaction. 

Then, on fine Sundays in summer, they always 
had early dinner and in the afternoon went for a 
sail on the river. This was the great pleasure of 
their existence, and they talked about it from one 
week's end to the other. Nothing was allowed to 
prevent their being together on that day, and they 
were vexed if any of their relations came to see 
them. You see they were still lovers. 

The sail was only a dozen miles or so, up the 
river and back; but the river was the Hudson and 
that little stretch of it between low banks lined 
with frequent houses and here and there a factory, 
though perhaps not much to boast of and certainly 
without real grandeur, will yet always seem to 
him the loveliest piece of scenery in the world. 
And to make quite sure that the illusion will re- 
main, he has never revisited the place, and is thus 
privileged to see it with the eyes of memory. 



[304] 



NOCTURNE 

THEY WERE always a bit late getting to 
the landing-place, where expectant passen- 
gers were cooped up until sailing time. For the 
young wife had to make herself very fine for this 
grand occasion, with her best frock and highly 
starched linens; and besides, there were the two 
children, a boy of four and a girl of two years, 
that had to be dolled up until the last possible 
moment. Sometimes a little vexed at her delay, 
he would pretend to start off by himself with the 
boy; and then she would hurry after him with a 
rustling of starched skirts and her pretty face red 
from the exertion, leading or carrying the little 
girl. Oh, they often tiffed about this and other 
trifles, as young couples do, perhaps to purchase 
the added sweetness of making up ; but they loved 
each other well for all that. And very proud he 
was of her youth and beauty, and her perfect 
health that made her seem fragrant as a flower. 
Proud also was he of the children, pretty like 
their mother, and especially of the boy, his first- 
born. 

On these Sunday outings, the latter wore a 
natty sailor suit, and his activity on the boat was 

[305] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

such as to keep his fond parents fully occupied; 
hence, they were always tired at night-fall and 
very glad when the little steamer pushed her nose 
into the home slip. 

Sometimes, in spite of their best vigilance, he 
would escape from them and hide somewhere in 
the murky lower quarters of the boat amid the 
throbbing machinery, giving them no end of 
trouble to find him. Or he would conceal himself in 
a part of the hold where he could almost dangle his 
feet in the water. Then the young mother's ter- 
ror would be great, and the father would swear 
to punish the urchin severely — but he never did. 
And now he recalled bitterly the many years 
marred by the waywardness of this spoiled first- 
born. 

Commonly the boat was crowded to capacity, 
and there was a great strife for seats and good 
places in the bow or on the shady side. The crowd 
was sometimes so rough and disorderly that he 
wondered what he should do in case of an 
accident; and then he resolved to save his wife 
and let the children go; not without an agony 
as acute as if the issue were actually presented 
to him. 
[ 306 ] 



NOCTURNE 

Sometimes, after embarking, they found them- 
selves squeezed against the rail, each with a child 
on knee, and scarcely able to move hand or foot, 
while the little steamer raced through the familiar 
landscape. But even so, they were happy, smil- 
ing at each other, and thinking of their mutual 
joys; oftenest of all, of the darkness and the re- 
turn home. 

Usually they brought a lunch and got beer or 
soft drinks on board. Entertainment of a sort 
was furnished on these trips by a middle-aged 
German and his wife, both very fat, and their 
two young daughters. The man tortured a fiddle 
of ancient and disreputable appearance, the woman 
drew shrieks out of a battered concertina, and 
the frauleins, who were pretty and yellow-haired, 
sang popular songs. Their voices were sweet and 
shrill, and their cheeks went very pink when they 
sang this refrain, which seemed to be a favourite 
with the Sunday crowds: — 

''She's my darling Carrie! 
Yes, the girl Vll marry. 
Every evening just at eight. 
Standing by her garden gate" 
Etc., etc. 

[307] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

This beautiful and thrilling ballad was especially- 
called for on the return trip, when the shadows 
were falling and the lovers on board drew their 
chairs nearer for company, or better still, some- 
times occupied the same chair. Then the fat Ger- 
man gave his old fiddle a rest and his fat wife 
ceased to torture the abused concertina. But first 
a collection will be taken, and then ladies and 
shentlemens, my daughters vill sing dot lovely 
song, " Carrie." 

This announcement was always hailed with ap- 
plause, and the collection was usually the heaviest 
of the day, causing the fat couple to exchange 
winks indicative of vast contentment. Finally the 
girls would take their station hand in hand, where 
the crowd was thickest with lovers, and set up 
the eternal refrain. Always they ended with this 
sentiment, which seemed to send an amorous throb 
through their audience, and which was usually 
followed by the sound of kisses, scuffling of chairs, 
and here and there a suppressed shriek amid the 
crowd— 

" Oh what bliss. 
One loving kiss 
From Car — rieJ" 
[308] 



NOCTURNE 

The last stanza was long drawn out and exe- 
cuted in crescendo — it never failed to make a hit 
with the excursion lovers. And though our mar- 
ried pair laughed at the silly song, and the young 
wife looked with disapproval at the violent flirta- 
tions going on about them, there was something in 
the air or the words that drew their hands and 
hearts together and whispered to them of — ^Home! 

Here the middle-aged man's meditations were 
broken by the entrance of a laughing young woman 
who took the child from its nurse's arms, saying: 
" I'm sure you'll think I'm imposing on you. 
Mamma, with this baby of mine. But " — with 
an ecstatic hug — " she's such a darling! " Then 
flinging a glance at the silent man by the win- 
dow, — 

" Oh, you needn't look so glum, Papa. I know 
you're holding it against me because I've made 
you a grandfather, a little before your time, yes? 
But for such a perfect love of a darling" (series 
of hugs) , " who wouldn't put up with a little thing 
like that!" 



[309] 



TEN 



YEARNINGS 



YOUR LETTER gave me a deep thrill of in- 
terest and emotion. I am old enough to 
offer you this as a genuine compliment. But you 
are wise, and you know that age does not count 
with persons of the idealistic temperament, in mat- 
ters of the heart. 

Yet I am not happy in replying to you. I 
dread new friendships, especially with women, 
which make disturbing claims upon a writer and 
interfere with his work. For no matter how much 
a woman may protest her interest in your artistic 
effort, she is always more concerned to gain your 
admiration for herself. Fatally, inevitably she is 
a rival to your work, stealing the thought from 
under your pen, intruding her brow, her eyes, her 
lips between you and the face of your Dream. 

Therefore, I pause ere I seal this letter, seized 
by I know not what presentiment of evil and mis- 
[310] 



YEARNINGS 

fortune from an act so simple. But our expecta- 
tion of blessings from the unknown is so strong, 
in spite of dolorous and repeated disillusions, that 
I end by taking the hazard — as always ! — and com- 
mitting to the post the letter which is now before 
you. And the written word being gone beyond 
recall, I have an access of doubt and regret which 
causes me the most poignant misery. 

Faint heart, you think, or perhaps more likely, 
the cold prudence of age? . . . 

I hasten to reassure you — though not what men 
call young, I am still far enough, thank God, 
from what women call old. Indeed, Madame, I 
have to strive constantly against this incorrigible 
youth of the heart — at once the blessing and the 
curse of the artistic nature — ^lest it lead me into 
folly unbecoming my years. 

But do not mistake me. I am stronger than I 
long was, for I have learned that Love is a ter- 
rible wastrel. And — pardon me! — I have other 
honey to give ere my course be run. After all, 
you see, the sun is not so high as once it was, and I 
cannot echo my youthful boast, that a woman is 
the only thing for me between the heavens and the 
earth. Ah, Madame! I have been thoroughly tried 

[311] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

in those sweet flames, and like holy Lawrence, I 
was anxious that the fire should reach every part. 
But one must pass on, after all — and especially, 
one must do his stint of work. . . . 

Then your letter came, as many a letter has come, 
and an old unrest of the heart was awakened. 
Why did I feel on touching your unopened letter, 
that it held some portentous word of fate, which 
not to hear or know were better for my peace? 
Whence these intuitions, sudden lights flashed on 
the soul, which seem intended to warn and save 
us? ... 

I looked long at the picture of the beautiful 
woman which came with your letter, and all my 
old cowardice and much of my old desire awoke. 
Those eyes, that mouth, that splendid hair, the 
whole conquering charm and beauty of you, might 
well have overthrown a stronger will than mine. 

Why did you send that picture if you were con- 
tent merely to be, as you said, a friend standing 
in the shadow, with no claim upon my life? Do 
you not see that by this act of yours, you have 
given the lie to your gracious promises? I might 
have feared you less, had I not thus early learned 
how much there is to fear! 
[312] 



YEARNINGS 

For in truth, I do fear this mimic semhlance of 
you, as if it were the living woman whom I have 
never seen. The eyes seem to burn into mine — 
the hps seem to plead for a kiss — the entire sov- 
ereign seduction of you transpires from the pic- 
tured card. Yes, Madame, rejoice in your con- 
quest! I do fear you; and I put away the 
picture where its insistent gaze may not aifect 
my nerves, in order to frame a reply to your 
letter. . , . 

LET ME begin by granting that a great pas- 
sion is the highest gift that can fall to a man 
of the artistic temperament. I mean, of course, 
a passion which soothing and satisfying, yet never 
cloying the physical man, shall spur the artist to 
the fullest exercise of his talent. I will even grant 
that the artist lacking this ideal companion and, 
in a sense, collaborator, must fail of complete ex- 
pression. Such a passion means to him, in a word, 
perfect health and efficiency. That genius gives 
the best account of itself which has its most fruit- 
ful dreams upon the bosom of love. 

Balzac, much as he feared woman as the most 
fatal source of distraction to the artist, yet knew, 

[313] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

as he knew everything, how greatly art is indebted 
to her. And despite the famous chapter on chas- 
tity in " Cousine Bette," we know that he allowed 
himself compensations far exceeding his written 
precept. Nor did he ever let go the fair hand of 
woman, while building the immense edifice of the 
" Human Comedy," as if dreading to lose the one 
vital source of inspiration. During nearly twenty 
years — ^practically the entire span of his creative 
life — he wrote almost daily letters to Madame 
Hanska, making her, as it were, the patron saint 
of his achievement. This was in truth the greatest 
of his romances. 

Byron, defendipig his connection with the Guic- 
cioli — the most fortunate of his friendships with 
women — declares in a letter to Moore that a pas- 
sion is absolutely necessary to the mental life of 
a poet. Further, he avers that but for his ad- 
ventures and affaires de coeur, he would have 
vegetated in obscurity, voiceless and unknown, like 
many an English squire. 

But, alas, Madame, how rare is such a passion 
among those clever but unfortunate people who 
make history, or biography, or scandal ! It would 
seem that ideal matings are reserved to the com- 
[314] 



YEARNINGS 

mon and undistinguished ones of the earth, or even 
the industrial classes. Who has not witnessed ex- 
quisite idyls of affection among the poor and 
lowly? Plumbers hit off the grand passion more 
luckily than poets. Haberdashers are more hap- 
pily married than great novelists and dramatists. 
Even the despised race of vagrant tinkers can 
point to examples of conjugal love and fidelity 
which put to shame the chronicles of genius. A 
wit of our time has aptly expressed the truth in 
this paraphrase of Gray's famous line — 

" The short and simple scandals of the poor," 

I suspect the poets have bargained ill with life, 
for what poem ever written can be compared to 
the perfect love of a woman's heart? . . . 

You remember how Daudet explored this pain- 
ful yet intensely human subject in his "Artists' 
Wives," certainly the most acute and searching, 
yet withal delicate, analysis of the whole matter 
that has been made. What a charmingly gentle 
chirurgeon he appears in probing and revealing 
these lesions of the heart! What bitter truths he 
tells without bitterness ! How pathetic these trag- 

[315] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

edies seem, which, upon reflection, we are as- 
tonished to find, present only the common stuff 
of experience: — it is the writer's art that has 
wrought the illusion. In Daudet's book, you will 
find every type of incompatible from the fool who 
hates her husband's talent and does him to death 
with her ignorant spleen, to the sly woman of the 
world who furthers her good man's interests at a 
certain expense to him unknown, in the peculiar 
French fashion. 

In the prologue to this charming book (which 
only a Frenchman could have written), Daudet 
seems to hold the thesis that men of the artistic 
vocation should not marry, the risks to their work 
being so great in an ill-assorted union. By way 
of clinching the point, he does not report a single 
strictly fortunate instance among his collection of 
artists' wives. Daudet was himself most felici- 
tously married, as all authorities agree, and his 
book seems to me the more remarkable on this 
account. 

That wonderful short-sighted observation of his, 
long applied to the world of Paris, where such 
examples abound, reports only tragedies or fail- 
ures. 
[316] 



YEARNINGS 

Is it not cruel, Madame? But perhaps you ask, 
why is the artist so tragically liable to the mis- 
fortunes of marriage? Let me answer in the 
words of Daudet. The first and greatest danger 
of marriage, he says, is the loss or degradation of 
one's talent. The ordinary run of men are, of 
course, exempted from this observation. " But 
for aU of us, poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, 
who live outside of life, wholly occupied in study- 
ing it, in reproducing it, holding ourselves always 
a little remote from it, as one steps back from a 
picture the better to see it, I say that marriage 
can only be the exception. To that nervous, ex- 
acting, impressionable being, that child-man that 
we call the artist, a special type of woman almost 
impossible to find, is needful; and the safest thing 
to do is not to look for her/' 

BUT IS the artist more fortunate, Madame, 
in seeking outside of marriage, in relations 
condemned by religion and the social law, that 
peace and joy which only union with a beloved 
woman can give? I will not deny that such con- 
nections occasionally seem to favour the painting 
of pictures and the writing of poetry or music — 

[317] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

the paucity of the known instances and the celeb- 
rity of the persons lending to these a significance 
which they may not properly claim. Such friend- 
ships, of the left hand, are scarcely to be spoken 
of in this country, though our reticence on the 
point is no proof that they do not exist — I believe 
indeed that relations of this kind, more shrewdly 
concealed than in Europe, are far less uncommon 
than our conventional hypocrisy would allow. 

Granting so much, what pledge of happiness do 
they offer the artist? — what hope of continuance, 
of fidelity and security? I believe in nothing so 
much as in miracles, Madame, yet there is but one 
answer to these questions. . . . 

Alas, there is danger wherever we turn. The 
Platonic friendship has long since been laughed 
out of court — it is possible only to the old or in- 
firm or sexually deficient. In the case of two 
normal persons, it is bound to end in possession, 
or — what is not so well known — in hatred on one 
side or the other. The man hates the woman who 
gives much without giving all; the woman hates 
the man who fears to take all while taking much. 
The sense of an unpaid debt leaves them perma- 
nently wrong toward each other. We touch here 
[318] 



YEARNIlSrGS 

the secret source of those wonderful acrimonies 
which are often disclosed among persons whose 
lives had seemed an open book. I should add that 
in these affairs, the woman is always more bitter 
and unforgiving than the man. With that spe- 
cial divination reserved to your adorable sex, you 
will readily understand why, Madame. . . . 

Let me conclude, dear unknown Friend, by ask- 
ing of you that which I fear to be impossible for 
us both. Remain unknown — unseen — unapproach- 
able: yet a light in the shadow, a hope in the 
emptiness of barren years, a cordial to the often 
weary heart and drooping spirit! Let me wor- 
ship you in secret — at once a glory and an illu- 
sion — like the unknown masterpiece of Balzac's 
painter. Let us, even like that infatuated artist, 
wise with the prescience of genius, forbid ourselves 
a meeting, a disclosure which could only put an 
end to our dream. Be and forever remain the un-i 
known masterpiece of my soul! 

Write to me sometimes, but — even better — leariJ 
to speak to me in the Silence . . . this is in truth 
the test of that higher love to which we both 
aspire. Do not, I pray you, ask me to come to 
see you ... ah, my God! why did you send 

[319] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

that picture? . . . Rather send the voiceless as- 
surance of your love to me as from a convent 
sanctuary whose high walls and vigilant guardians 
keep us forever apart. 

Can you obey me in all this? 

"Yes!" I hear you cry, with a dolorous and 
passionate eagerness. But even in the accents of 
that solemn pledge of renunciation, I detect the 
tone with which you will welcome me to your 
arms, and I know my feet to be set in the ways 
that lead to you! 

WHEN THE writer had traced the last word 
of the foregoing letter, his brow was a little 
pale from the effort of composition and also from 
the emotion which his thoughts had induced. 
Sinking back in the deep study chair, he clasped 
his hands above his head with an habitual gesture, 
and said to himself in a half -vexed way: 

" I swear this foolishness gets a man, in spite of 
himself. No aid to seduction so potent as the 
imagination! " 

At this moment the wife of his bosom entered 
the room and kissed him lightly on the forehead. 
Then with conjugal assurance, picking up the 
[320] 



YEARNINGS 

scattered sheets on his writing table, she glanced 
carelessly over them. 

"Ah," she remarked indifferently, in no wise 
affected by the real or simulated passion of the 
written words, " so the women of unsatisfied yearn- 
ings are after you again? Poor dear! — what a 
bore to have to write such people." 

" My love," replied her husband, a little wearily, 
" when they stop writing at last it will mean trou- 
ble of a more serious kind; for I shall then know 
that I have lost my ' punch.' " 

" Ye-es," she assented abstractedly, still looking 
through the manuscript; " but her picture that you 
speak of so warmly — where is it? " And her tone 
became staccato all of a sudden, seemed to admif 
of no trifling. 

" My dear," he rejoined in conciliatory fashion, 
" I did not want a recurrence of — ^you know what 
— (he winced as he spoke) and so I destroyed it." 

Their eyes fully met and she held his long, but 
he did not waver. 

" You are a dear," she said, after a moment's 
hesitation, " and also — though I your wife say it — 
an artist ! " 

[321] 



ELEVEN 



PLATONICS 



I BELIEVE it never has been settled whether 
a true friendship, without love, is possible be- 
tween the sexes. Candid philosophers say not. 
They argue that friendship as understood between 
men, " passing the love of woman," requires above 
all things a logical mind, and this they deny to 
the softer sex. Hence the noble friendships so 
often occurring among men, free from the taint 
of selfishness and appealing to the higher sympa- 
thies of our nature, are (they say) impossible be- 
tween men and women. Sex is the preventing 
cause. 

However, other philosophers have held the con- 
trary with no small show of reason. ISTow and 
then they have even made experiments in their 
own persons — as, for example, Abelard — with re- 
sults which, while not absolutely confirming their 
[322] 



PLATONICS 

theories, have afforded some of the most amusing 
literature in the world. 

To a simple mind, indeed, the spectacle of a 
philosopher meddhng with Platonics calls up the 
familiar image of the monkey and the buzz-saw. 
But all things are not essentially as they appear 
to the simple mind. 

So the problem remains unsolved and of peren- 
nial fascination. 

Let me state it more frankly: Can a man and 
a woman of no great disparity in point of age and 
temperament have a close, hearty, and genuine 
friendship without any element of sexual love 
entering therein? 

Isn't it a hard one? And what one of us has 
not puzzled his head and sometimes hurt his heart 
over it? 

The French, to be sure, have blazed a warning 
for us in their famous adage: "A woman either 
loves or hates." 

An epigram, you say, and only a half-truth at 
best. Ah, but who shall give us the whole truth 
as to any human proposition? And what a pierc- 
ing half-truth it is ! The more I learn of the sex — 
and, please God, I shall be always learning, lov- 

[323] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

ing, and suffering through them — the more I am 
convinced that it applies to them universally. 

Oh, yes, she must love or hate — ^there is no 
middle way. And if this be true or only half 
true, it needs no argument to prove how vainly 
men sometimes seek a perfect friendship with 
women — a friendship without the crosses and the 
delights of love. I doubt if such a friendship is 
ever in a woman's thought. Recall your expe- 
riences. The moment a woman takes you up as 
a friend she loves you, though she may not admit 
the fact to herself: the moment she puts you down 
she hates you. It is quite a bewildering expe- 
rience for the man, handicapped as he is by the 
logical faculty; but no doubt it has some secret 
satisfaction for the woman. To be much loved is 
therefore to be much hated: that is the bitter half 
of the apple. 

For, alas! it is true that woman's love is near 
akin to hate — " a lovely and a fearful thing," as 
sang a poet who had drained the cup to the dregs. 
I sometimes wonder is either quality to be found 
unmixed with the other? Can we have love with- 
out hate or hate without love? The only glimpse 
of hatred I have ever had that quite appalled me 
[324] 



PLATONICS 

was from one who had loved me very much — ^in 
a trice, by one glance from a woman's eyes, I was 
whirled from a green and smiling Paradise into 
a lurid Hell. . . . Ah, happy they who neither 
love nor hate! 

A man who has had some interesting friendships 
with women of talent confides to me that the 
cause of their usual failure is the feminine lack 
of logic. A woman, he says, wants to monopolize 
you in friendship as in love. You must have 
no friends save of her choosing. You must take 
over and make your own her private antipathies 
and prejudices. You must like where she likes, 
dislike where she dislikes, and, in short, see the 
world through her eyes. The arrangement by 
which two men agree to hold each other in the 
firmest friendship without regard to the fact that 
a third man may be heartily loved by the one 
and as heartily hated by the other — ^that logical 
adjustment of relations which keeps the world in 
balance, is a function peculiar to the masculine 
mind and is looked upon by women as monstrous 
and immoral. Hence the impossibility of holding 
such friendships with them as were the dream of 
Plato, or even such wholesome, agreeable, and 

[325] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

mutually profitable relations as we so often see 
subsisting between men. 

My friend also mentioned, as a curious experi- 
ence of his in a Platonic way, that women import 
into their friendships with men — irreproachable 
friendships, of course — ^that somewhat cruel, feline 
and punishing spirit which they are said to mani- 
fest toward their lovers and husbands, recipients 
of their most intimate favours. A confirmed and 
perfect Platonist, my friend justly felt that any 
and every symptom of sexual love should be rigour- 
ously excluded from an ideal friendship between 
man and woman. But he was obliged to confess 
that nothing was so trying, in his harmless com- 
merce with women, as the effort to secure this 
condition; and often he was made to feel that, 
though the caresses of love were not reserved for 
him, he got more than a due share of the scratches. 

So far I went willingly whither my friend led 
me. But I pointed out to him that a stronger 
hand was leading us both back to the original 
difficulty, the crux of the problem — I mean the 
impossibihty of the sexes meeting on any common 
ground but that of sex. 

And there we dropped the matter, as many a 
[326] 



PLATONICS 

wiser man has done since the days of Plato, and 
as whoso neglects to do shall gather fruit to his 
sorrow. . . . 

Moral? Oh, yes! she must either love or hate. 



[327] 



TWELVE 



FALSE YOUTH 



THE PASSIONS make trouble for us during 
the greater part of our lives, and it may be 
true that, in a sense, they are themselves the 
deepest potential proof of life. Many people un- 
doubtedly cultivate and cherish their passions on 
this presumption; some such are of our familiar 
acquaintance, while there be famous instances in 
Holy Writ and in the profane but no less inspired 
pages of Balzac. Instead of giving thanks, like 
Sophocles, that age has freed them from the tyr- 
anny of carnal desires, they dread more than any- 
thing the cessation of these, and they pray that 
their torments may continue with them to the end. 
It is a common error to suppose that the most 
tragic and violent effects of passion are limited to 
youth: an error too much fostered by popular 
romances, as well as the public reserve maintained 
on this subject. Such exceptions as force them- 
[328] 



FALSE YOUTH 

selves upon the public notice from time to time 
are dismissed as abnormal, and society refuses to 
discuss the matter. 

No, it is not Youth that furnishes the darkest, 
the most fatal and convulsing dramas of passion, 
but rather that period of life we call middle age, 
beginning in man at the forty-fifth, in woman at 
the thirty-fifth year. Then or thereabouts com- 
mences for both a season of false youth, the Indian 
Summer of the sexual passions, during which de- 
sire is felt with a violence and exacerbation never 
known before. Especially is this apt to be the 
case if either the man or the woman have ceased 
to love his or her partner and is tempted to seek 
another object of passion: a lamentably common 
incident. 

The state is one that demands for the fullest 
understanding thereof a psychological as well as 
physiological explanation, which it is not my busi- 
ness to offer. But this I will say: the malady of 
false youth is largely induced by the fear of age, 
with consequent loss of the power of pleasing the 
opposite sex. It may be that such fear is stronger 
in women than in men: the reserve which females 
maintain on the subject and the mystery with 

[329] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

which it is enveloped yield no positive clue. In 
this, as in other respects, woman keeps her secret; 
yet certain inklings, such as the revelations of 
Karin Michaehs, in her book, " The Dangerous 
Age," leave us to infer that there is little differ- 
ence between the sexes on this point. That both 
men and women alike dread the end of sex-life, 
and the latter the more since it means the loss of 
their greatest power, are conclusions that may be 
frankly accepted. Hence that element of hardi- 
hood, of recklessness and desperation in the pas- 
sions of middle age which so often shocks us in 
actual life, so as to merit the Latin appellation 
nefanda — meaning things forbidden to be spoken 
of, or under the taboo of Nature herself. Such 
incidents tempt at once and dishearten the por- 
trayers of life. For the world will not have such 
disorders exhibited, except under conditions very 
difficult; it turns away from the most powerful 
depiction thereof in book or play as something 
monstrous and unfit for art. Balzac indeed ex- 
plored this as every other sinister province in life, 
but it remains a question whether he is not more 
hated than admired for it; for the world dislikes 
to hear, quite as much as it needs to realize, the 
[330] 



FALSE YOUTH 

terrible truths set forth with such unsparing real- 
ism in " Cousine Bette." 

Even as such things are passed by in fiction or 
remain still-born in drama, so are they hushed up 
and smothered in the reality of every-day exist- 
ence. Truth of this sort is indeed stranger than 
fiction, but society will not have it on any terms; 
rightly it feels that behind such explosions of ill- 
timed passion are forces that, if let loose, would 
tear the social structure to pieces. 

The passion of youth is ever regarded as an 
amahilis insania, and all things are pardoned to 
it by grace of its talisman, Romance. We are not 
offended by the sweet unconscious immodesties of 
Juliet, nor careful to provide an expurgated ver- 
sion for om- children; her story remains an open 
page to each new generation of maidenhood. But 
the world refuses to admit a romantic interest in 
the amorous disorders of the middle-aged; it sees 
only the fearful nature of the scandal threatening 
the peace and honour of famihes — the shock of a 
revelation which upsets the established belief in 
virtue. 

All the world loves a lover, it is true, but not 
an old lover. Had Romeo and Juliet been of 

[ 331 ] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

middle-age we would never have heard of their 
sweet folly or star-crossed love ; Shakespeare would 
not have immortalized nor the world canonized 
them; and it is very doubtful if a fugitive echo 
had reached us of the two old fools of Verona! 

So it is that such passions and tragedies of the 
middle-aged, though always occurring, are seldom 
exposed to the naked censorship of public opinion. 
The honour of the community is engaged, as by an 
unwritten law, to suppress such scandals, and 
even the newspapers are apt to leave them alone. 
But we have all heard of such, and we shall con- 
tinue to hear of them so long as the elements of 
human nature remain as they are. There is 
no change in the eternal Decameron of human 
passion. 

I have referred to the boldness and hardihood, 
the extreme daring which often mark the " ro- 
mances " of elderly persons ; indeed they quite 
match or even surpass anything recorded in the 
Book of Youth. The type of Ninon is far from 
being an uncommon one among women. Elderly 
Romeos are taking the fatal draught, elderly 
Juliets are following suit every day; or both are 
coming by their desire without tragic denouement, 
[ 332 ] 



FALSE YOUTH 

beyond the occasional breaking up of a family on 
either side. In any case, high courage is required 
for the business, which is apt to alternate between 
tragic risks and a perilous sort of comedy. 

Perhaps such misadventures would not happen 
so often if the world would but cure itself of these 
persisting illusions, namely: — 

Its inexpugnable belief in female virtue and its 
incurable superstition that children preserve and 
guarantee a woman against temptation. 

Its equally persistent and absurd notion that 
middle age separates a woman from passion and 
its liabilities. 

Its foolish persuasion that woman is different 
from man in regard to the laws governing her 
sexual life. 

False youth comes to both, and for the woman 
no less than the man it is potent to tear up the 
tooted sacred ties of life, flout the honour of mar- 
riage, corrupt the innocence of childhood, and 
turn the sanctuary of home into a romping place 
for devils! 

Think not, Mr. Safe-Husband, that you may 
lay aside all anxiety concerning your dear wife, 
because forsooth she has passed her prime and the 

[333] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

tints of autumn begin to mark her beauty. Nay, 
now indeed you shall do well to love her and court 
her and cherish her and watch her as never before : 
of a truth there be wolves abroad and anigh who 
would not scorn your one ewe lamb. Are you a 
bit wanton and lickerish yourself, though a good 
husband as men go, and do you with a full share 
of that amiable conceit which hath been the cuck- 
olding of many a simpleton, take it to be a man's 
privilege, etc.? — the discerning reader will easily 
supply the rest. 

Have a care lest she learn the trick from you, 
when it shaU go hard but she will better the 
lesson — mayhap to the sorrow and confusion of 
your house! 



[334] 



THIRTEEN 



GHOSTS 



I BELIEVE in ghosts. But hear me — I mean 
ghosts of the living, not of the dead. Ghosts 
that you can see at noonday. Ghosts that excite 
no fear and that present nothing spectral to the 
eye. Ghosts to us alone! — not to themselves or 
to the indifferent crowd. 

They are, first of all, the women whom we have 
loved, perhaps too well, and who loved us in re- 
turn, or made us so believe: but who are now as 
if dead to us, as we are dead to them. 

Do not ask why — a stupid question. There are 
a hundred reasons for the thing. 

It was but yesterday you stood very near a 
charming little ghost of this species, and she was 
not aware of your presence. You were both in 
a crowd at the Grand Central Station and you 
stood just behind her. In days that are past, she 
would have " sensed " you at once had you been 

[335] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

farther away. In love as in hate we are gifted 
with a second sight. But now she was totally- 
unconscious that your breath fell on her right ear. 
The seat of telepathy is in the heart, you see, and 
you two no longer thought of each other — save 
as ghosts. 

And yet it was not so very long ago that a casual 
meeting would have filled you both with joy — ^you 
know it, for there are some things a woman cannot 
dissemble. You thought the same thoughts, and 
sometimes expressed them in the same words, to 
your mutual fond amusement. Merely to lunch 
with her was a liberal education (if the shade of 
Dick Steele will tolerate the paraphrase). No 
sooner had you left her than you went home and 
wrote to her the things which you had forgotten or 
feared to say (she always knew they would come) . 
And even in sleep you could not break the spell of 
her possession of you, which she maintained by a 
hundred quite innocent and exquisite seductions: 
now that it is all a closed chapter you are glad that 
they were innocent — that nothing really came of 
it. Nothing in your life was ever so sweet or so 
much to be regretted. 

Oh, heart of mine (you apostrophize her warily 
[ 336 ] 



GHOSTS 

and wordlessly) but a little while ago I would 
have followed you to the ridge of the world, and 
the desire of you seemed the whole of life. And 
yet here I am standing so near that I might 
touch you with my hand, but not the less I 
know you to be at an irrecoverable distance 
from me, and so my heart is strangely at peace — 
my heart that would once have burst at the 
enforced silence! . . . 

You could see that there was an expression of 
calm wifely dignity on her face, the reflection of 
a tranquil, assured, and conventional happiness. 
She was still pretty, but without a certain bird- 
hke coquetry of allure incompatible with the mar- 
ried state. And you recollected the charming 
little moue she sometimes made when teasing you. 

. . . But, as you were saying, the lady is now 

a ghost! . . . 

WHAT STRANGE emotion quickens the 
heart on coming face to face unexpectedly 
with one of those animated spectres who bear a 
relation to us quite different from the rest of the 
breathing world ! As I have said, a kind of second 
sight seems called into play by this melancholy 

[337] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

rencontre, for you see the living-dead with a weird 
and startling clearness — as one sees the face of 
an enemy in a dream! — ^yet almost without con- 
sciously observing him. And all the time you feel 
as if a cold wind blew upon you and you stood 
in the very presence of Fate. And without eye 
meeting eye or by any the least sign giving token 
of recognition, you feel yourself subjected to the 
like terrible stripping and scrutiny by the x-ray 
of hate that once was love. 

Such meetings are very unpleasant, but they 
help you to realize that Hfe is not all bridge and 
marmalade. 

Just the other day, in this fashion, I encountered 
my old crony Whiffles for the first time in the 
dozen years since our ahenation. I never did you 
wrong, O Whiffles, and if you wronged me, your 
friend, I forgive you; but ghosts we shall be to 
each other until the Great Release. . . . 

A good fellow Whiffles, and I was fond of him, 
in . spite of his terrible Scotch egotism and his 
tyrannous rule of the talk (never was such a 
coursing tongue hung in a Scotchman's jowl), 
and his variant, flyaway humours. A very human 
creature withal, of a spirit that often threw out 
[338] 



GHOSTS 

strange lights that seemed to portend no common 
destiny. 

Maybe I liked him the better for his roaring 
Keltic faults, seeing that he could be as tender 
and faithful a friend as our favourite Alan Brech 
(in those days Robert Louis was our god and a 
bond betwixt us), — and hang it! youth is of a 
grand tolerance when its loyalty and affection are 
engaged. I knew men who constantly longed and 
daily vowed to smash Whiffles, but his anfractu- 
osities pleased me, hke a sauce piquante. 

How did we break? A stupid thing to ask, 
since the finest and firmest friendships are dis- 
solved every hour for the veriest trifle. The 
wonder would be if there were ever a real cause! 

Then I almost ran into the arms of this old 
friend with whom I have shared some of the best 
hours of my youth, while we talked and drank our 
fill and disputed each other's pet opinions. I say 
I liked Whiffles and so at times I would affect to 
give in, else he might have brought a sickness on 
himself with his lust to overcome me. But I never 
really was vanquished or convinced by the man. 
And yet I should ask nothing better than to go 
back through those long years of estrangement 

[339] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

and hold head to him again over the drink and 
the debate. 

Well, as I was saying, almost I tumbled into his 
arms; but the sight of a living ghost acts marvel- 
lously in restoring one's self-possession, and I got 
a grip on myself just in time to avoid an awkward 
situation. Maybe they know in Heaven just how 
long I parried an impulse to take him by the hand 
in the name of our old comradeship — it was a 
space too brief to estimate as we reckon time here 
below. But in these affairs the heart is ruled by 
a sure intuition. Whiffles and I exchanged the 
x-ray of the aUenated and passed each other as 
strangers. ... A tall man, with a reddish-grey 
beard (it flamed like his temper when I knew 
him), the least supernatural person in appearance 
that you could wish to look on; but so far as I 
am concerned, as veritable a ghost as ever walked 
the ways of the living. . . . 

DO NOT think to frighten me with tales of the 
dead who leave their resting graves at night 
to pursue some uncanny mission. The churchyard 
never held a fear for me, and if the dead walked 
my path, I would brush them from me Uke sum- 
[340] 



GHOSTS 

mer insects. Ah! believe me, the grave never pro- 
duced a pang hke that seizure of the heart, that 
death-in-life sensation with which we must greet 
a living ghost from out our past, though seen at 
noon-day. I am fey for days after seeing one — 
even such a rosy blue-eyed spectre as the little 
woman mentioned above. 

Do you wonder, then, that I hold to this position: 
— If there must be ghosts, let them come from 
death, not life! 



[341] 



FOURTEEN 



, THE AGE OF SAFETY 



NOT LONG ago a sly little troll of a Scandi- 
navian woman put forth a book which she 
called " The Dangerous Age." It made some- 
thing of a pother, owing to the frankness of the 
author in dealing with matters of sex that are, 
generally speaking, taboo with us. One expects 
a literary woman to go far along this line (inde- 
cency is her jorte when she really sets out to shock 
us), but the little Scandinavian person went the 
limit. And she quite riddled the old notion that 
virtue is a matter of geography, as expressed in 
Byron's couplet — 

What men call gallantry and gods adulfry. 

Is much more common where the climate's sultry, 

I was myself surprised that in the frozen North 
there could be such prurient consideration of a 
theme which is usually left to the Latin South for 
[ 342 ] 



THE AGE OF SAFETY 

congenial literary treatment. Undoubtedly, that 
aided the modest author in her evident purpose 
to make a scandal and a sensation, in which she 
perfectly succeeded. 

The little Scandinavian woman made even 
wicked Lutetia stare with her frank disclosure 
of certain things which women are never supposed 
to reveal, save in the most intimate confidences 
among themselves. She broke the Law of Sex, 
or in male parlance, " struck below the belt," and 
thereby forfeited the sympathy and support of 
women. Therefore, her visit to this country was 
a failure: even Madame New York could not 
tolerate a woman who boldly avowed, through the 
heroine of her fiction, that she Hked men to go 
unbathed — with the charm about them of Horace's 
" olentis hirci! " Moreover, she had humiliated all 
womanhood by revealing secrets of the gyneceum 
never whispered before, thus affording new 
weapons to the common enemy Man! It was 
too much even for the robust candour which 
certain advanced females among us import into 
their discussions of Sex. Charlotte Perkins Gilman 
positively refused to meet this imprudent sister of 
the North — and what could you expect after that? 

[ 343 ] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

Her visit to America was, as I have said, a failure 
socially, and I suspect her publishers were not 
much in pocket thereby. 

However, it must be allowed that her book was 
a good deal of a success, and got itself read and 
wrangled about pretty much the world over. She 
had " told on " her sex, as perhaps never woman 
writer had done before. Unlovely as the revela- 
tion was, that was enough to make her book sought 
after by all manner of people. Men hked it much 
better than women, for an obvious reason — it had 
snatched away the veil from the inscrutability 
of sex. 

But there is a larger profit for them in this 
book, if they will consider it rightly. Karin 
Michaelis named as the "dangerous age" the 
middle term of life at which a woman ordinarily 
ceases to exert a physical fascination upon men. 
She must then resign herself to be no longer sued 
and pursued, courted and caressed, and she can 
no longer hope to occupy a disproportionate share 
of one man's time, or of that of many, if she be 
plurally disposed. All is finished for her: she can 
neither give the disease nor impart the remedy; 
and she is effaced as a source of the most insidious 
[ 344 ] 



THE AGE OF SAFETY 

and universal trouble that the world has ever 
known. 

Is it not sad, Mesdames? — and who could blame 
you for being vexed with this odious little Scandi- 
navian and her hatefully candid book? . . . 

But looking now to the advantage of my own 
sex, I see not why the Dangerous Age for women 
should not be the Age of Safety for men, and I 
wish it might occur as early for the one as for the 
other. 

WHAT THINKING man but has rejoiced 
at the end of that long slavery, so often 
ignoble in its basis, to which he has sacrificed his 
golden years? Oh, the blind worship of dolls, red- 
hpped and long-haired and bauble-eyed, by which 
a man gets no profit of his youth and often goes 
maimed all his days! Oh, the cursed tyranny of 
the flesh, to which strength yields up its best 
sinews, genius its highest aspirations, ambition its 
loftiest dreams! What tragedies are to be laid to 
it! — secret tragedies from which the world bleeds, 
though it dare not pubHsh them. What worse 
tragedy than that of the hatred and alienation 
which too often mark the end of this bondage 

[345] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

of the flesh for both man and woman! When, 
oh when will the world learn to use this thing as a 
blessing instead of a plague and a curse? . . . 
Not very soon, it is to be feared ; but the sooner, 
we may hope, when men and women alike, instead 
of lamenting the end of sexual domination or seek- 
ing to prolong it, shall rather rejoice at regaining 
their freedom. It is a degrading yoke, as we 
know, which presses many almost from the cradle 
to the grave. Some of the ancient poets not in- 
aptly saw in it the malice of the gods, and Sopho- 
cles gave public thanks when he was at length 
freed from the stings of desire (that he was then 
about eighty does not damage the present moral) . 
In our civilization it prevents the full development 
of the race — perhaps we can not conceive what men 
and women would look like, or what their intel- 
lectual possibilities would be, without the handi- 
cap imposed upon them by countless ages of sex- 
ual slavery. So deeply rooted is it, both in the 
strength and the weakness of humanity, so con- 
firmed by the sanction of religion and the pre- 
scription of immemorial habit, that a real reform 
can be hoped for only among the ultimate emanci- 
pations of the race. ... 
[ 346 ] 



FIFTEEN 

BEST 

THIS LITTLE word is one of the sweetest 
and most consoling of our common speech. 

Merely to utter it. gives one pause, for many- 
are its pious and healing implications. If nothing 
more, it conveys the image of a great hush and the 
fall of coohng, noiseless waters on ears closed to 
the sensuous challenge of life. 

It expresses an idea which is cherished in the 
innermost heart of humanity, as if in obedience 
to some Divine instinct. Also it signifies one of 
the great illusions that make the hardest life not 
merely endurable but spiced with a single element 
of romance. 

But nothing can be said on this subject which 
is not trite, the theme being one of the eternal 
staples of human gossip and speculation. As, 
without the hope of rest some day, who would have 
strength or will to go on with his burden? Or, 

[ 347 ] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

it is the one light that never quite fails us in our 
journey to the grave. Perhaps of all the sayings 
of JesuSj the most touching, the one that has 
found deepest echo in the heart of humanity, is 
this : " Come unto me all ye that labour and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest." 

The promise of rest is one that every man makes 
himself, from the poorest to the richest. Nay, the 
need of it levels all distinctions of fortune, for 
the rich man has a proverbial difficulty of attain- 
ing it. Lazarus plans to take things easy in the 
eleemosynary line when his children are grown up. 
Dives will really settle down to enjoy life when 
he has lifted that last million. 

Both cheat themselves, have always cheated 
themselves, and yet the Great Illusion endures. 
It outlasts love itself, for the fondest lovers are 
glad at length to turn away from each other — ^to 
rest! 



Where the bridegroom all night through 
Shall not turn him to the bride. 



Yes, dearie, I know it is written that we shall 
rest from our labours — but not on this side of the 
[ 348 ] 



REST 

heavenly Jordan. For I have come to iSfty years 
in this pilgrimage of life, and I do not yet see 
the beginning of my rest. The beginning? — alas, 
when has this old heart of mine borne more anxious 
labour than at present? Often it will not let me 
sleep o' nights for its complaining — ah, what 
things the heart tells us at such times, when it 
seems to have intuition of its destiny! And some- 
times, from a depth almost below consciousness, 
it whispers of a boon it desires very much and 
yet fears to name. Rest? . . . Aye, rest indeed! 

BUT SHORT of that dreaded consummation, 
do we — ^nay, can we — ever really rest? We 
are sure the heart never stops beating, and there be 
learned men who affirm that the brain is always 
in a state of activity, conscious or unconscious. I 
am apt to agree with this, as I have scarcely slept 
without dreams since boyhood. Is it any wonder 
that we go wrong with our poor brains so over- 
worked — never suffered to run down even once in 
fifty years ! . . . 

There is thus involved a double idea which makes 
the thought of final rest (as dissociated from the 
fear of death) so precious and consoling to us. It 

[349] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

is that we shall escape not alone the " slings and 
arrows of outrageous fortune," but also that we 
shall be freed from the fardels of our own physi- 
cal, individual life. Rest and immunity from both 
are to be had only upon one condition — a condition 
which does not always seem so hard, dearie, after 
you have come to fifty year! 

Not that you need love life the less at that 
epoch — indeed you are apt to love it the more and 
to yearn for it as one must for all lovely and perish- 
able things. But while your sense of the precious- 
ness of life is increased, so likewise is your per- 
ception of its illusions. In youth, in order to gain 
the keenest edge for our joys, we make it a point 
of honour to ignore certain things that enter into 
the account. This might be called the truce of 
youth. Age is bound by no such exigent comity: 
it knows that the rose is sweet, and it has an ironic 
sense of what is behind the sweetness of the rose. 
This is not an advantage, in especial, except as it 
tends to facilitate the final abdication and bring 
you to your portion of rest. 

But still we revolt against that, save at the very 
last moment, and cling to the hope that we shall 
have the repose we crave on less ineluctable terms. 
[350] 



REST 

We want to rest, oh so much, but also we want 
to hve and enjoy it — to know that we are resting. 
And while we voice our vain plea the heart and the 
brain keep up their unintermittent labour and an- 
guish. How hard it is to make these children 
understand ! 

THERE IS an old Latin phrase which casts 
some light on the problem — Parva domus, 
magna quies: Small is the house, but great the 
peace thereof! 

The world is too much with us, even in age, that 
we should have here the perfect rest we seek. How 
shall you bribe the poor heart that wakes in sad 
loneliness at night to weep over its lost youth or 
to tremble before the exaggerated cares of the 
morrow? 

Ah! there is but one way, the oldest of human 
fashions, which we are too apt to associate with 
images of horror and repulsion. And though we 
cry for rest — rest — rest all the term of our Hves, 
and insist that life has been to us a martyrdom, 
yet do we shrink from the true Rest when at last 
it comes to our relief. See! it is but a single step 
to the narrow house and the great peace, the per- 

[351] 



REALITIES AND INVENTIONS 

feet rest: but no! we cry out in terror and turn 
back to the life that has scourged us so cruelly. 
Anything but that! we exclaim, while the long 
awaited and entreated One stands patient by. . . . 

How hard it is, dearie, to make these children 
understand! . . . 

Give us our rest, O Father, in thine own ap- 
pointed time and of thy gracious olden fashion. 
Lay thy annulling seal upon the o'erlaboured 
heart: drop thy healing nepenthe into the weary 
brain. Teach us not to fear that which brings 
us nearer to Thee. Suffer us to go to sleep 
with no more consciousness than the flowers that 
take no care for their awakening. Give us this 
last and best of all thy gifts — Parva domtis, magna 
quies! 



[352] 



LAGNIAPPE 



LAGNIAPPE 
ONE 

PHILOSOPHY IN LITTLE 

The Literary Motive 

IF YOU ask me what is the first word of art, 
I answer: Patience. And the second: again 
Patience. And the third, once more: Patience! 

II 

To write at all it is necessary to do both good 
and bad work — the proportion is what matters. 

Ill 

A vast amount of nonsense is put forth by 
literary persons in the name of posterity. There 
is dishonesty as well as nonsense in this. The 
truth is, every earnest writer works in and for 
the present, with little thought of posterity. With- 

[355] 



LAGNIAPPE 

out the stimulus furnished by a living audience, it 
is very doubtful if any literature worth while 
would be produced. 

IV 

Robert Louis says wisely that it is not how 
much we earn for our day's wage, but how we 
earn it, that really matters. 

A crust and freedom would suit me better than 
any sort of servitude or capitulation, though 
gilded with the income of a Carnegie. But the 
world is so organized that one can at best but 
clutch the shadow of independence. Well, even 
for the shadow I would risk much. . . .Nay, I 
would be the veriest beggar in thy courts, oh 
Liberty ! 



In the time of Pericles there were no news- 
papers, yet even the fish-wives discussed the great 
orators and poets in excellent Attic. In these 
piping days of journalism everybody is taking on 
the newspaper mind and our popular dialect is 
become a sort of disease borrowed from the lazar- 
house of languages. 
[356] 



PHILOSOPHY IN LITTLE 

VI 

Nothing is so difficult as to think, so to speak, 
in a straight line, for the mind's strongest tend- 
ency is to turn round on itself like a mouse in a 
cage. The faculty of straight-out thinking is one 
of the rarest, and no man who possesses it can 
escape the divining rod of Fame. Sometimes it 
makes a great philosopher like Kant, or a world- 
master like Napoleon, or a grand creative artist 
like Balzac. 

VII 

Byron said that Curran talked more and better 
poetry than he had ever read. Allowing for the 
hyperbole, one sees why Curran never wrote any- 
thing equal to such praise. Talking and writing 
are two different things and presuppose two very 
different kinds of talent. 

VIII 

No task were possible did we not see the end of 
it from the beginning, and perhaps, with all our 
love of life, we should shrink from it with a thou- 
sand-fold terror were there no certainty of death. 
Swift's conception of a tribe of human beings who 

[357] 



LAGNIAPPE 

could not die, is justly voted the most horrible in 
literature. 

IX 

Every reflective genius needs the second and the 
third thought, and hence this type is rarely great 
or successful in action. " I think like a man and 
act like a child," said Renan. 

x 
I have got through caring much about style — 
what I care for is a man or a woman who has 
LIVED. Mere style is the affectation and wor- 
ship of pedagogues or pinheads. 

XI 

To hold the Ideal to-day is no assurance that 
you will gain it to-morrow: — even the humblest 
writer is plagued with pages of past work which 
his heart misgives him he will never again equal. 

XII 

" I have taken too many crops out of the brain," 
said Thackeray, predicting his early death. It is 
the kind of crop, however, that tells. Bad writers 
generally live long. 
[ 358 ] 



PHILOSOPHY IN LITTLE 

XIII 

Lafcadio Hearn would have given his books to 
the publishers for the privilege of correcting his 
proofs. This is the spirit that makes literature 
but keeps you out of the "best sellers." 

XIV 

It is a thrilling thought that I shall live while 
my thought survives and fructifies in other minds. 
Fail me not, thou inner light! 

XV 

If thou wouldst have good of thy genius, flee 
the chatterers; — power is from the Silence. 

XVI 

Plague on the voluminous! I had rather write 
a half-dozen perfect pages than the " hundred 
novels of old man Dumas." 

XVII 

Constant effort is the price of literary produc- 
tion : — the source of talent is a well that often seals 
up over-night. 

[359] 



LAGNIAPPE 

XVIII 



At one's best, one writes up to the level of 
somebody's faith and love and admiration: — 
there is no other way to the heights. 



XIX 



Perhaps the bitterest thought that can come to 
a man is that the work to which he has set his hand 
is not worth the doing at all. And it is a thought 
that has plagued the greatest. 



XX 



Balzac's old Goriot says : — " We bring our chil- 
dren into the world and they drive us out of it." 
This is one of the truths for telling which a writer 
is hated by the public. 

XXI 

Nothing is rarer than to find a writer possess- 
ing literature and life in equal degree. Of the 
two it is better, for success, to be short on litera- 
ture and long on life. 

XXII 

The day is long for power and purpose; short 
for weakness and irresolution. 
[360] 



PHILOSOPHY IN LITTLE 

XXIII 

The first step in learning how to write is to 
learn how to feel. 

XXIV 

When head and heart ripen together, rich is 
the harvest. 

xxv"^ 

Fail not to make a daily offering to the great 
god Futility! 

Truths and Truisms 

BARRING ACCIDENTS, most people live 
as long as they want to : the Life Force de- 
pends upon the will even more than is now recog- 
nized. But you shall not keep the precious boon 
of hfe by fleeing all effort, caring merely to live 
and lying close like a hare in its form: — lie you 
never so close the thrifty Reaper will not pass you 
by. Therefore, look to it — to hve is to WILL 
and to will is TO DO. 

II 
What is it in human nature that makes men 
love to grovel before fetiches of flesh or stone? 

[ 361 ] 



LAGNIAPPE 

Nothing is more certain than that millions prefer 
such prostration to the noblest dignity and free- 
dom. To kowtow to any fool drest in a little 
brief authority, — this is one of the strongest and 
most deeply rooted of human instincts: it is also 
the chief obstacle to human progress. No doubt 
it harks back to those early ages of the world, and 
some not so remote, when fear and superstition 
were the supreme governing forces. And though 
the substance of these be long since gone, the 
shadow still affrights us. 

Ill 

Candour is inculcated in all the copy-books, but 
a man who attempts to make his way in the world 
without cunning, both aggressive and defensive, 
soon finds himself as a lamb among wolves. It's 
a pity that our stock moralities are drawn up with- 
out reference to the facts of life. 

rv 

No hypocrisy is more common among men than 
a pretence of friendship and regard. And yet, 
hollow as it is, nothing avails more to keep the 
frame of things together. 
[362] 



PHILOSOPHY IN LITTLE 

V 

We need the friend that is near much less than 
the friend that is remote. Perhaps the most pre- 
cious and helpful sympathy acts only from afar. 

VI 

Complain not that thou art ever longing and 
unsatisfied — ^to be content and without desire is 
the portion of Age or Death. 

VII 

There is so much treachery in the run of men 
that Jesus Christ ought to be accepted as Divine 
from this fact alone — that He managed to pick 
twelve with but one traitor among them! 

VIII 

In former years I was somewhat romantically 
inclined, but now I find myself apt to agree with 
Bacon, that there is very little friendship among 
men. Still, I continue to dream of a friend! 

IX 

The tongue is an obscene member, as certain 
votaries of Venus well know; one does not readily 

[ 363 ] 



LAGNIAPPE 

show it, even to the doctor. Have a care of thy 
tongue — it may be the primeval Snake! 

X 

There is consolation behind every catastrophe. 
Nothing better attests the wisdom of the Greeks 
than the eternal fable of Pandora. 

XI 

Disraeli's famous saying that no sensible man 
ever tells his religion, is in some danger of being 
discredited with Dr. Eliot and so many others 
rushing into print. But are they really telling? 

XII 

Many a soul dies in terror to awake and find 
God smiling upon it. 

XIII 

To be free is to be alone. The herd may admire 
and envy your state, but all the same they give 
you the road and go by on the other side. 

XIV 

There is enough good in life to make us wish 
to live forever and enough evil to reconcile us to 
any death. 
[364] 



PHILOSOPHY IN LITTLE 

XV 

Seen from Sirius, doubtless our troubles are not 
of so much consequence. 

XVI 

That men do not live too long is perhaps the 
one thing for which they have sound reason to 
be grateful. 

XVII 

To praise a man's talent and a woman's beauty, 
though you do not believe in either, is the most 
profitable of perjuries. 

XVIII 

Let us not hate life because we have to relin- 
quish it, but let us fold our tent with serenity and 
pass out with a Hail ! to the advancing generations. 

XIX 

I have known many men, and many more have 
heard my name, but the friends of my heart — ah, 
how easy it is to number them! 

[365] 



LAGNIAPPE 

XX 

Age enables us to see life stripped of illusions, 
even as autumn shows us the wood in its bare 
anatomy. 

XXI 

There isn't a single laugh in the Bible from 
beginning to end. This is no laughing matter. 

The Woman 

SHE IS a fool, Barry," says Sir Charles 
Lyndon, referring to his amiable consort, 
"but she will kill you as she has killed me." 
Nothing in that masterpiece of " Barry Lyndon " 
better certifies the greatness of Thackeray. And 
they call him satirist because he would not blink 
the facts of life! 

II 

In the time of Montaigne a man was considered 
old at forty; nowadays there is a well-marked 
period of second youth, fruitful in romance, which 
sets in about forty-five and may run to sixty — • 
it all depends on the woman. 
[ 366 ] 



PHILOSOPHY IN LITTLE 

III 
I love women — oh yes, I confess it ! — but I must 
say that I have never seen the Principle of Evil 
incarnate in a man in such a degree as now and 
then it appears in a woman. 

IV 

Tell a woman one thing about herself which she 
does not like to hear, and you stand bare in her 
regard, with no shred of grace from all your pre- 
vious loyalty and lip service. 



The Garden of Eden story is now generally dis- 
credited, but a long time yet will be required to 
clear up the character of the Snake and the 
Woman. 

VI 

Fortune is personified as a woman, not merely 
for that it is fickle, but because, in a deep sense, 
woman is the bringer of most good or evil fortune. 

VII 

When age forbids a woman to attract with her 
sex she sometimes falls back on the ordinary hu- 

[367] 



LAGNIAPPE 

man virtues. This is a compensation not to be 
despised. 

VIII 

There has never been discovered an acceptable 
substitute for youth — but women continue to rum- 
mage the vanity shops. 

IX 

To have love is to have power: — Love is the 
mighty parent and begetter. 



The true test of love comes when both man and 
woman have reached a " certain " age. 

XI 

Never look to be forgiven by the man who has 
wronged you. The woman, however, sometimes 
relents. 

XII 

There has never been a kingdom of this or any 
other world that a man would not throw away for 
the woman of his heart. 
[368] 



PHILOSOPHY IN LITTLE 

XIII 

It is a law of Nature that sex should preoccupy 
the best years of life — an unjust law most of us 
feel, sooner or later. 

XIV 

Is this the climacteric — ^when a man stops see- 
ing the faces of women in his dreams? 

XV 

To hate where one has loved is an exquisite in- 
dulgence which some people mistake for a virtue. 

, XVI 

The illusion of sex countenances all the other 
illusions. 



[369] 



TWO 



THE GEAIN OF WHEAT 



IT IS curious how the vital word — the electric 
spark of true feeling or passion — survives in 
literature, though it have to be recovered even as 
a single grain of wheat from many bushels of 
chaff. I felt this strongly t'other day in look- 
ing through Hazlitt's lectures on the Elizabethan 
dramatists. Rather a dull book in the main, I 
fear, though Hazlitt is one of my cherished famil- 
iars; dull not so much by fault of the lecturer as 
by the intolerable length, and too often most un- 
poetic quality of many of the " specimens " pre- 
sented. And decidedly hard reading. It seems 
wonderful that Hazlitt found an audience to sit 
them out, and I suspect they confirmed his friend 
Lamb in those humourous prejudices of his against 
lecturing, which find expression in one of his 
quaint letters. 

Hazlitt's own sound talk, without close reference 
[370] 



THE GRAIN OF WHEAT 

to his subject, is much the better part of these 
lectures, though I go not so far as to say they were 
not worth doing. Indeed, I would utter no such 
censure upon any work of honest Hazlitt's. Only 
I wish there were more of him to the " intolerable 
deal " of Elizabethan. 

But to my point. How the vital word leaps 
out from those musty old forgotten plays which, 
generally without true inspiration or artistic 
" staying power,^" and written in a manner almost 
obsolete, scarce the talent of Hazlitt could serve 
to make interesting. Profiting by his pioneer la- 
bours in this field, I offer a few instances. 

Old Decker's monument is in one line — a char- 
acterization of Christ: 

"The first true gentleman that ever breathed/' 

John Lyly's little Campaspe song of a dozen 
lines, which tells how Cupid lost his eyes to the 
beauty, has long survived his plays. 

Of Marlowe, that mighty young rival of Shake- 
speare, we have strictly speaking only one line — 

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? 

[371] 



LAGNIAPPE 

The couplet, 

Cut is the branch that might have grown full 

straight. 
And burned is Apollo's laurel bough, 

though memorable from its application to the poet 
himself, is seldom quoted even by scholars. 
Beaumont and Fletcher have — 

'tis not a life, 
'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away, 

in admiring the simple pathos of which we may 
well echo the praise of Hazlitt. 

Beaumont alone has the world-famous and 
memorable — 

What things have we seen 
Done, at the Mermaid! 

Also: 

So nimble and so full of subtile flame. 

And (less often quoted) — 

Nothing so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy. 
[372] 



THE GRAIN OF WHEAT 

Ben Jonson, who thought himself a peg or two 
above Shakespeare, and who certainly wrote a ton 
of learned rubbish, has — 

Drink to me only with thine eyes, 

for which a world of lovers should forgive him 
much; as also — 

Oh so white! Oh so soft! Oh so sweet is she! 

And the noble apostrophe — 

Dear son of memory and great heir of fame. 

With a few other famihar references to Shake- 
speare. And that exquisiteness in little — 

^' the bag o* the hee" 

Here's shrinkage, of a truth; but 'tis the fan 
with which winnowing Time has sifted the Eliza- 
bethans, some of whom plumed themselves, the 
public concurring, on their successful rivalry of 
Shakespeare. In truth, the great William seems 
not to have been inclined to contradict them, for 

[ 373 ] 



LAGNIAPPE 

does he not modestly speak of his " desiring this 
man's art and that man's scope," etc.? It seems 
to me not the least wonderful circmnstance of the 
glorious legend of Shakespeare. . . . 

I trust the valiant reader who has come so far 
with me may reckon not vainly that he has gleaned 
a few grains of wheat by the way, now that we 
have reached 



THE END. 



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